I Built a Live AI Web App With a Working Paywall in One Weekend — Zero Coding Experience. Here's What Broke.

My only prior technical experience was opening game files in Notepad++. Last weekend I built and deployed a working AI-powered web tool — complete with a paywall, access codes, PDF download, and a live URL. I wrote zero code. Claude wrote all of it. What I actually did was describe, test, and report back when things broke. Turns out that's most of the job. Here's what stopped me cold and how each one got fixed: The Netlify timeout — Claude takes 15-25 seconds to respond. Netlify's free ti er kills functions after 10 seconds. Every request timed out. The fix was changing the architecture entirely: call the API directly from the browser instead of through a server function. Not the "correct" way. The way that works. The silent Formspree bug — The feedback form showed a success message every time. No emails ever arrived. One inverted condition in the JavaScript. The UI lied. The lesson: test that outputs actually arrive somewhere, not just that the interface says they did. The paywall any