Get Camino build log · 1 of 10
What makes an AI-built app "real"
Before the story of what I built, the standard I refused to ship without — and why it’s the standard, not the tooling, that separates a product from a demo.
- Real users on a real domain, full dev / staging / prod pipelines
- English and Spanish — plus German, Italian, French
- Unit, integration, and end-to-end tests in CI
- Error monitoring with uptime paging
- Rate limiting verified against live traffic
- Staged environments with deploy guardrails
- Security headers checked in production
- A citation on every claim, enforced by a build gate
“Executive builds an app with AI” is a genre now. Most of them are demos.
So before I tell you about mine, here’s the bar I held myself to — the eight lines above, and not one of them optional. A polished demo clears maybe three.
That bar is met. Get Camino, a relocation guide for people moving to Spain, is live on the web today, with iOS and Android in app-store review.
Here’s the part that should get your attention: I hadn’t written production code in 15 years. I built this in under a week with Claude Code and Anthropic’s Fable model, with some Opus 4.8 thrown in.
And here’s the part that keeps it honest: the week was fast because of thirty years of engineering judgment, not despite it. AI collapsed the cost of typing. It did nothing to collapse the cost of being wrong — that part was still my job.
In the notes that follow, I break the build down into leadership lessons for the AI era, with receipts: the architecture invariants, the truth pipeline, the ops story, the testing story, and the bug my wife found that three builds had survived.