AI Put Me on a Pedestal. Then I Looked Down

People say AI is good for demos, not for production. I disagree. It is good for production too. But you have to know how to use it, and you have to verify before you believe. Both Claude Code and OpenCode tell you this on the screen. They mean it.

What you can take from this

Use the harness, not the chat window. This is the most useful thing I can tell you. I asked someone on my team to optimise some stored procedures. A week later he said he was giving up, because the AI was not giving proper answers. I asked what he had given it. He had pasted the procedure text into a chat. Of course that failed. Give it the database connection instead and tell it to run the procedure, measure it and find the problem itself. A chat window cannot.

Break the problem down and think from first principles. The software lifecycle exists for a reason and AI does not repeal it.

On money, do not start at two hundred dollars. With Claude start at one hundred, because the twenty dollar plan runs out in two or three days. With ChatGPT the twenty dollar plan holds up fine, and you can point it at a tool like OpenCode.

And never write a rule twice. Make it a check that fails loudly, or drop it.

Where this leaves me

Shipped, then: one website, one thing running in production for me, two libraries on NuGet and two frameworks on npm, one of which I published in the same week I was cutting it in half.

Not shipped: everything else in that table. TrSetup is being archived, because I built a setup tool for a framework nobody but me was installing. And there is an IDE I parked after the AI itself pointed out that a lot of companies were building IDEs and this looked more like an ego project than a product. It was right.

I am not going to announce what ships next. Every time I have said a plan out loud, it has not happened.

What I will commit to are the two rules that made last month my most productive with AI. A weekly review of what I actually did, with a correction based on it. And no repository number twenty six until the ones I have are published or archived.

Lieberman's list runs to thirty features. I have maybe four, badly. Still more than I had in August 2025, when I had a two hundred dollar subscription, an empty folder and no idea what I was going to finish.

There are two more ideas sitting in a note on my phone. They are staying there.