I’m not a software engineer, but I’m a relatively technical tinker. In earlier posts, I built apps using Replit, Firebase Studio, and Gemini Canvas. Gemini Canvas is pure magic for spinning up an idea in 30 seconds with zero code, but it doesn’t do well for more complex apps that need a database. Firebase Studio is great if you want a powerful, scalable setup — but it can feel a bit unwieldy for a hobbyist like me (I’ll do a deeper dive on that later).
That’s where Replit shines. It’s a sort of Swiss Army knife — a perfect middle ground for quickly going from idea to deployed app. In this article, I’ll go deeper into the pros and cons of going production-ready on Replit.
Note #1: This isn’t a step-by-step guide. Other articles do that much better — this is more about my experience using Replit to ship something real.
Note#2: I’m using the paid version of Replit, which gives me a better model with better prompt reasoning and code generation.
Why going to production requires more than just code
If you’re new to all this, here are a few basics that separate a toy app from one that’s production-ready:
✅ Database — Storing user data and app data.
✅ Custom domain — Giving your app a real branded URL.
✅ Hosting — Moving from “local preview” to “actually live on the internet.”
✅ Deployment — Transitioning from sandbox to a real, stable environment.
✅ Monitoring — Checking errors and usage after going live.
This typically requires 5+ tools. And the cool thing about Replit? It takes care of all of this out of the box.
People often talk about no-code tools making it easy to ship SaaS apps without writing a single line of code — that’s mostly true. Going to production, for example, is another story.
Even though Replit Agent wrote most of the code, I still had to code review and occasionally debug. But the speed production code is generated is mind-blowing. That’s what allowed me to build something meaningful in hours instead of days or weeks.
What I built
Let me introduce Calendar Autobot, your AI assistant to transform any emails and images into calendar events. You can literally forward an email with a flight itinerary or kids camp schedule, and the bot will add the event to your Google Calendar. A few caveats:
- I might add a SMS feature, making it easier to send images
- Adding email support was extra work that took me beyond the 3-hour goal.
- Vibe coded Chrome Extension as well
Impressive debugging saves the day
Every app has bugs — yes, especially the ones built by AI. And debugging isn’t just about fixing the problem; it’s about playing detective: reading logs, tracing the code path, and narrowing in on what went wrong. Sometimes a typo can take (a human) hours to find!
What surprised me is how well Replit handled all that on its own. Without me having to point it in the right direction, it flagged issues I hadn’t even noticed — just by parsing the logs.
Pro tip: I had Replit add a bunch of logging early on, which turned out to be a huge help for its AI when it came time to debug. Highly recommend that.
What’s the catch?
There were several places where the Replit Agent/Assistant got stuck. Replit always gives a preview of the code it is about to write, and sometimes the logic doesn’t make sense. When they’re stuck they do one of the two things:
❌ The AI sometimes bloats the codebase — creating new code instead of fixing existing logic.
❌ It can also spin in circles, especially around tricky third-party integrations like Google OAuth or Mailgun.
When that happened, I had to jump in — pasting documentation links and writing hyper-specific prompts to steer the AI in the right direction. Even so, that’s faster than writing everything myself. What took me a few hours could easily have taken me 3–4 weeks solo.
Other considerations that slows down development
💡 What happens when users don’t give OAuth consent?
💡 What if users forward random spam emails?
💡 What happens when there are many events in a single email? (note: this is purely prompt engineering, not coding)
The details
Tech stack:
Python, Flask, PostgreSQL
Integrations: OpenAI, Google OAuth, Mailgun
Where Replit saved the most time:
✅ Bootstrapping: A single prompt gave me an app 70% of the way. I used Google AI Studio to generate the prompt, so even prompting was made simple!
Here’s my starter prompt:
Using Python Flask and Google AI Python SDK, create a backend API service that transforms text into calendar events. It takes some text, either from email or document, and extracts date information from them. Text can be a travel itinerary, school event, or any date/time related events. From the extracted data, integrate with Google calendar and create corresponding events. For frontend, use any popular framework.
A sample prompt I would feed into this API would be:
Given the following text, extract all event information. For each event, identify:
The event name.
The event description that gives context to this calendar event.
The start date (in YYYY-MM-DD format).
The start time (in HH:MM 24-hour format, if specified).
The end date (in YYYY-MM-DD format, if specified or different from start date).
The end time (in HH:MM 24-hour format, if specified).
The location (if specified).
If a date is relative (e.g., “next Monday,” “tomorrow”), assume the current date is [INSERT CURRENT DATE HERE, e.g., 2023–10–27] for resolving it.
Provide the output as a JSON list, where each object in the list represents an event with keys: “event_description”, “start_date”, “start_time”, “end_date”, “end_time”, “location”. If a piece of information is not found, use null or an empty string for its value.
Text: “”” [PASTE THE EMAIL/DOCUMENT TEXT HERE] “””
✅ Refactoring code: At one point, routes.py got too big to manage, so I have to get it to rewrite it.
✅ Marketing and Branding: Replit generated a logo and marketing page for me. I don’t even have to write marketing copy!
✅ DB Migration: Replit automatically creates mini scripts to run for database migrations
✅ Deployment to production: Going live was literally one click. This alone would have taken me a week to figure out.
✅ Error fixing: Fixing errors that pop up every now and then. Simply prompt: fix error in console and it just does it. This is slightly different than debugging, which is still somewhat manual and takes up most of my time (more details below).
✅ Collaboration: While I didn’t use this feature, it’s touted as one of the differentiators compared to other vibe coding tools
✅ Source control: Versioning and simple source control built-in
Where I spent the most time wrestling Replit
🔍 Google OAuth: It initially generated working code, even though very messy, inefficient auth workflow. I had to correct this by prompting specific fixes, but it just resulted in more bloated code and unnecessary API calls. Eventually, I pasted the official docs and prompting the AI carefully, and it worked as expected.
Pro tip: I’m surprised how great Replit’s AI is at reading external documentation. If you’re technical and know that AI is generating garbage code, just feed it dev docs like this one.
🪲 Debugging: If something went wrong and Replit couldn’t figure it out after several tries, I was back in the driver’s seat — manually reading logs and helping the AI understand what to do.
Pro tip: Disable “automatically publish changes” and review Replit’s code, especially for big changes. It will save a lot of time later on if something doesn’t go as planned because you’re in the loop.
⚠️ Production control: One-click deployment is great, but if something breaks, logging is limited (oftentimes crashes) and prod database setup is non-existant.
Pro tip: Always use a separate production database, and I’m seriously considering using external logging analytics.
The verdict
Is Replit perfect? No.
Is it amazing for hobbyists? Absolutely.
If you value speed, ease of use, and getting something real into the world over fine-tuning every deployment detail, Replit is one of the most productive tools you’ll ever use. It’s a terrific all-in-one platform for side projects or small SaaS apps where moving fast is more important than absolute control.
And that’s exactly why I’ll keep using it — especially when my goal is shipping something fun without overthinking it.
Follow me on X (https://x.com/willcheung) for more insights like this.
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