The Stack.

The core of everything. Not just code generation — architectural thinking, content writing, design decisions, debugging, and strategy. Claude is the first conversation before any line of code is written.

React-based framework for building multi-page websites. One file = one page. Shared components written once, used everywhere. Vercel (the company behind Next.js) makes deployment seamless.

Postgres database + authentication + real-time + storage — all in one. The backend layer I never have to think about. Write SQL once, the API is auto-generated.

Every file, every change, every version — tracked. The source of truth for all code. Also the trigger that starts the deployment pipeline automatically.

The deployment platform made by the same team as Next.js. Connects to GitHub, builds and deploys automatically on every push. Free tier handles everything at this scale.

AI-powered frontend builder. Describe what you want in plain English, get working React code. Best for fast prototypes and exploring UI ideas before committing to production code.

Prompting is a skill, not a shortcut

The quality of AI output is entirely a function of how well you describe the problem. "Make a button" and "Make a primary call-to-action button in sage green that scales on hover with a subtle shadow" produce wildly different results. Investment in learning to prompt = compound returns.

Components before pages

Build the navigation and footer first. These are shared. Everything else is unique per page. I wasted time on landing pages with copy-pasted nav because I didn't know about components. Never again.

Your database schema is your architecture

Supabase tables are simple — but the decisions you make about structure shape everything downstream. Think about what data you're collecting and how you'll query it before creating the table.

Ship → observe → fix → ship

The cycle time matters more than the perfect build. A live site with three bugs teaches you more than a perfect local version nobody sees. GitHub → Vercel makes this loop fast enough to be useful.

Design system first, pages second

The most valuable thing I built was a consistent set of CSS variables (colours, fonts, radius, shadow) before touching any page. Changing the sage green now means changing one line, not 40.

Domain expertise is the actual differentiator

An AI tool doesn't know what a real estate sales team needs. I do. The intersection of "knows the domain deeply" + "can now build using AI" is where the competitive moat lives.