Building DocProof: A Solo Dev Journey with AI as My Co-Pilot

I shipped DocProof recently—a privacy-first document verification service. But this post isn't about what it does. It's about how it got built, and what it's like to develop a product in 2026 with AI assistance. Short version: I couldn't have done it this fast without Claude for code-assistance, and ChatGPT for ideation. And I want to be honest about what that actually looked like. The starting point I'm a fullstack software engineer. I know my way around code. But DocProof touched areas where I'm not an expert: blockchain integration, cryptographic hashing in the browser, smart contract deployment, Stripe payment flows, and a dozen other things I'd never done exactly this way before. A few years ago, this would've meant weeks of documentation rabbit holes, Stack Overflow threads & trial-and-error. I'd still have built it—but slower, with more frustration, and probably with more architectural mistakes baked in. This time, I had a different approach. Claude as a thinking partner I start