Building with AI-powered tools? Avoid far too common pitfalls and scale like a pro—from your docs to your database. Save yourself the pain I learned the hard way. #lowcode #ai #startup #nocode #founder

If you're using tools like Lovable or other low code platforms to build your first web app without a lot of coding experience, here are five things that will save you a massive amount of time and headaches. First thing, create a product requirements document, PRD, before you even touch the build button. Product requirements documents really outline what your product will all be about. Use ChatGPT or Claude to help you define the functional requirements, your tech stack, and most importantly your database schema. Ask it to create enterprise level database schema with users, organizations, and all the key tables that support your business logic. Try not to wing this part, but it does save a lot of time and headaches in the future. Second is plan for an API layer, application programming interface. Most of these tools connect your front end directly to the database, which looks great in demos and you can quickly get something out fast, but it can become a nightmare in production. Your database credentials probably shouldn't live in your front end code. The API layer is where your business logic lives, the API, the AI calls, the handling and exchanging between your database. Third, once you have a UI that you're happy with, you're probably going to need to pull in the code into a proper IDE like VS Code or Cursor. Set up an AI agent in there because you'll hit cases that no tutorial covers. Fourth, create a detailed instructions for your AI agent in these tools for design patterns. By default, these models will write beginner code, print statements everywhere, no proper error handling, dummy data might get hard-coded. You want to minimize that error rate. You want ship-ready code from the start. Fifth, understand database migrations before you need them. Plan your table structure carefully. If something's called year, it should probably be a date-time field, not a string. Set up proper migration system early to understand the difference between your development and production databases and applying schema changes as you need them. It's easy to over-promise and under-deliver with these tools because they try to make everything look simple from a marketing perspective, but taking time up front to plan these fundamentals will save you a lot of rebuilding in the future when your first real users start breaking things or you want to scale for an exit. They'll want to make sure these things are in place. I'm learning a lot of this stuff the hard way too, so you don't have to. So follow along for more real-world lessons from the trenches. Cool, what are you building?