/ 01 / ProblemAn AI consumer app that wouldn't need a Series A to ship.
DreamyBot's founder wanted a real AI product with real subscriptions, not a demo. The brief was direct: one engineer, no backend hires, and a roadmap that put Claude in five different places. I said yes because this is exactly the role I built up Node and Python alongside my Flutter work for.
/ 02 / DecisionFastAPI for AI, Node for everything else.
Node runs everything that talks to RevenueCat, Stripe, and Firebase. The SDKs are first-class and the deploy story is dull in a good way. FastAPI runs everything that talks to an LLM. Python's tooling around prompts, embeddings, and evals is two years ahead of Node's, and the streaming primitives in fastapi.responses are quietly excellent.
/ 03 / BuildWhat I'd do again.
- Prompts versioned in the repo, never in a database. Roll back is
git revert. - One eval suite per prompt. Run it on every PR.
- RevenueCat from day one, even if monetization is a quarter away.
- Log every model response with a hash of the system prompt. You will need this in week six.
