I built a simple link locker 3 years ago. AI helped me turn it into a real product.

The beginning About 3 years ago I was learning frontend development. I wanted to build something real, so I made a simple link shortener with a password. Next.js + Firebase, nothing fancy. You create a short link, set a password, share it. That was it. I deployed it and mostly forgot about it. Surprisingly, people kept using it Every now and then I'd check the analytics and see people were actually using it. Not a lot, but consistently. Some were sharing Wi-Fi passwords, some were sending credentials to coworkers. The core idea was simple enough that it just worked. I always wanted to add more features but between work and life I never got around to it. Then AI changed everything A few months ago I started using Claude Code and my productivity went through the roof. Things that would have taken me weeks I was finishing in a day or two. So I finally went back to my old side project and started building everything I'd been putting off: Stripe payments for a Pro tier E2E encrypted anonymo