AI writes code in one minute. Aubzhang spent three days making it not hurt the eyes — and making it survive launch.
Friends asked privately: if AI is this good, can't you just throw the requirements at it and the site runs?
Aubzhang can only smile bitterly. Real product delivery is not a fairy tale. Today he strips it down and walks through the three pits he fell into.
The First Half: An Aesthetic Tug-of-War, Forcing AI to Subtract
A dozen years a product person, Aubzhang has a borderline unhealthy obsession with "minimal." AI's default taste, on the other hand, is hard to describe politely.
At the start, he asked the foreman (WorkBuddy) to build a homepage. It delivered in one second.
Aubzhang looked at the screen and nearly had a heart attack: gradients in loud reds and purples across the whole page, buttons as rounded as a tacky website from ten years ago, and heavy, pointless shadows piled everywhere.
The feeling was walking into a small-town karaoke bar with the gaudiest renovation you've ever seen.
Aubzhang can't code, but he knew this couldn't stand. He called in the strategist (DeepSeek), threw it his reasons for rejecting the ugliness, and had it translate them into precise revision instructions.
Then he issued WorkBuddy three hard orders:
- Cut the framework: native HTML and CSS only. No fancy libraries.
- Fix the colors: pure white background, dark gray text. One accent color on the entire site — Aubzhang Blue (#2f6feb). Not even the hover value may drift.
- Lock the typography: body width fixed at 720px, line-height 1.8, mobile font size 15px. Not one pixel more.
A full day of arguing. Delete, rewrite, rewrite, delete. Finally the screen settled into a clean sheet of white paper with exactly the right breathing room.
Aubzhang's take: AI understands code, but it doesn't understand restraint. The product manager's eye is what decides whether a product feels premium.
The Second Half: Demining the Infrastructure, Beaten Up by the Real Network
Perfect locally. Aubzhang happily dragged it up to Cloudflare. That's when the nightmare actually started.
Pitfall one: perfect locally, all broken online.
One swipe on the phone and he froze: every image gone, just gray-white boxes where they should be.
Half a day of digging: it was paths and letter casing. Mac doesn't care about case; the web server is brutally strict about it. On top of that, AI had mixed absolute and relative paths.
Aubzhang laid down the law: all images go into their matching folder under assets/, and the code uses relative paths only.
Pitfall two: alien script inside WeChat.
He shared it to WeChat and got a wall of mojibake — "锟斤拷" everywhere. Beautiful Chinese turned into hieroglyphics.
A screenshot to DeepSeek explained it: the server was missing a charset=utf-8 response header.
Aubzhang chewed through the configuration, hand-wrote a _headers file, and forced the encoding declaration. Chinese came back.
Pitfall three: the new page that absolutely would not refresh.
Code uploaded. Refresh on the phone. Still yesterday's content.
Aubzhang thought his phone was broken. Turns out this thing is called CDN edge caching. To speed things up, pages live on nodes all over the world. He'd changed the source; the nodes hadn't changed.
The fix: after every update, go into the dashboard and hit Purge Everything, kicking the stale data out.
Final Thoughts
Even with the best AI at your side, real delivery is still full of these tedious, dirty scraps of engineering common sense.
Code can be handed to AI. The aesthetic you hold yourself. The skeleton can be handed to AI. The pits in the underlying environment, you step in yourself.
AI supplies the bricks. The product manager controls the taste. And the foundation down in the network layer, you tamp down yourself.