Then people start using it. And a question you didn't have on Friday shows up: who's looking after this?
What you got, and what you didn't
An AI tool gave you an app that does what you asked. It didn't give you someone who knows why it was built that way, or will still remember it in a year.
For a side project, that's fine. When you take bookings, hold customer details or move money, it stops being fine.
AI debt
Quick fixes tend to leave something behind. A change that works today, written without the whole app in mind, makes the next change harder. Do that fifty times and you've got software that nobody fully understands, including the tool that wrote it.
Developers call this technical debt. We call the AI-built kind AI debt. You pay it a little on every change, and sometimes all at once.
Here's how it tends to feel:
- A new feature breaks an old one, and you can't see why.
- You ask for a fix and get a different problem.
- You're scared to change anything.
- You can't say where your customers' data sits or who can reach it.
Five questions for your app
- If it stopped working tonight, how would you find out?
- Can you get your data back if something deletes it?
- Do you know what's stored, and who can see it?
- Could someone else pick this up tomorrow?
- If you stopped paying for one tool, what would stop working?
Any question you can't answer is where to start.
What it needs next
An app that proved the idea has done its job. What it needs next is an owner: someone who looks after security, fixes what breaks, and keeps it moving as your business changes.
You can be that owner, if that's how you want to spend your evenings. If you'd rather spend them on your business, adoovi can look after it for you.
