Embarrassing AI #36: Deployment is the WORST

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I have good news and I have bad news.

Let’s start with the bad news.

After spending two hours straight with Claude debugging why my deployment to Railway was failing, seemingly going in endless loops, I felt exactly like the meme of the guy who destroys his computer.

Exactly. That one.

Even Claude was ready to call it a day:

Lucky for Claude it worked because I was just about ready to ignore all the praise it gets for coding and go running straight to Gemini, my newest, current bestie.

Deployments give me PTSD from my early days as a project manager when we used to deploy code to production for Citi bank. More often than not, it resulted in a call at 02:30 in the morning when something had gone terribly wrong. Nothing that 3-4 hours of panicked rage debugging by bleary eyed developers could not fix, though.

Good times.

So the bad news is that even though I had the full intention of putting the deployment of this very local directory behind me. I’m going to have to come back and clean up the last couple of loose ends. Not least of which, adding the custom URL I purchased for it.

I fear for my sanity and the safety of Claude if I spend any more time on this today.

The good news is that I can still show you how my finished directory of Fair Lawn businesses looks.

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present to you one fully functional directory of all Fair Lawn businesses built entirely with AI, including a back end that scrapes data from google and writes all the descriptions.

In the future I want to automate much of the cutting and pasting and updating that I did manually to the code, the DB and during deployment. I’m sure that is already possible but it was good seeing the sausage being made.

I will detain the big reveal no longer. Please enjoy.

Tools I am using to fake being an expert.

1. Beehiiv (The Platform)

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2. Wispr Flow (The Time Saver)

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3. Emergent (The Coding Cheat)

"I am not a coder. Emergent is my 'vibe coding' partner that writes the messy parts for me. Essential if you want to build apps without a CS degree."

Last Word.

Claude has no idea how close I was to sticking it in the blender.

Making daily progress,

P.S. Did I do something totally backwards today? Or do you have a better prompt for this? Hit reply and tell me. I’m here to learn just as much as you are. (I read every single email).