What every indie dev should master before asking AI to build for them

How to stay in control when your AI starts writing code faster than you can think.

Before AI coding assistants, I wasted months chasing the “right stack.”

React or Vue? Flask or Django? Docker or bare VPS?

I’d open fifty tabs and still end up staring at a blinking cursor.

Now, we’re in a world where you can describe your idea and watch an AI spin up a working prototype. It feels magical — until you try to debug it.

The truth is, vibe coding only works if you understand what the AI is building for you.

Otherwise, you’re just rearranging generated code and hoping for the best.

So, before you ask AI to build your SaaS, here’s what you need to master first.

These aren’t frameworks or libraries — they’re the mental models that make AI your assistant, not your babysitter.

Version Control: Command the Timeline

I used to treat Git like a magical undo button — until it undid everything.

Even as a solo builder, Git is your safety net. Learn to branch, merge, revert, and tag with confidence.

Every “oh no” moment becomes recoverable when you know how to roll back.

🧠 Pro tip:

Integrate your favorite AI tool with GitHub’s MCP. You can tell it to open PRs, summarize diffs, or write changelogs.

But here’s the catch — to delegate effectively, you need to understand version control first.

Also, Magit for VSCode is an underrated gem. It makes Git feel almost fun.

Data: Model, Don’t Just Store

No SaaS survives without a solid data model. I learned that the hard way, after my “fast” prototype crawled because I hadn’t indexed anything.

Knowing how to design schemas, choose keys, and plan migrations will save you more pain than any ORM ever could.

Your data model will evolve. Be ready for it.

🧠 AI Tip:

Discuss your schema with your LLM.

Ask, “What should I index?”, “How will this evolve?”, or “What’s the best way to handle this relationship?”

You’ll get insights that feel like having a senior engineer on call.

HTTP & APIs: Speak the Native Language

Every SaaS runs on HTTP.

Learn verbs, status codes, and what to return when things go wrong.

In my early days, I’d return 200 for everything — even errors.

Don’t do that. It makes your users (and future self) miserable.

🧠 AI Tip:

Tools like Context7 make working with APIs much easier.

And yes, keep an OpenAPI spec. It’s documentation for your future self, not just a team.

(And between us — your first SaaS might not even need an API. We’ll talk about that soon.)

Authentication: Shop the Shelf

I built my own login systems multiple times.

It always ended with regret and sleepless nights.

Don’t code your own auth unless you’re writing a security product.

Use your framework’s built-in module, or plug in Supabase, Clerk, or Auth0. I wrote about this:

Security is not where you show creativity.

🧠 AI Tip:

LLMs can wire up cookie handling, password resets, and JWTs, but make sure you know where your secrets live and how they expire.

Frontend Literacy: Communicate, Don’t Overcomplicate

Frontend used to terrify me. CSS felt like chaos, and every “simple” change broke something else.

Then I discovered the power of simple stacks — HTML, Tailwind, and maybe HTMX or Alpine.js.

You don’t need React to make a clean, usable product.

You just need enough literacy to connect your API to a button and make it look decent.

🧠 AI Tip:

AI is terrible at design. It’ll give you perfect code for ugly UIs.

Feed it visual specs instead of vague prompts.

And if you can, learn a bit of design — not to be a designer, but to avoid obvious aesthetic crimes.

Caching: Respect the User’s Time

I once doubled my server bill because I didn’t cache anything.

Caching isn’t optimization — it’s respect.

You don’t need to master Redis or CDN tuning, but understand the concept:

store what doesn’t change, reuse what you can.

🧠 AI Tip:

Ask, “Where can I add caching for quick wins?”

AI can spot bottlenecks faster than you think.

Containers & Deployment: Build Once, Run Anywhere

I used to fear Docker. It felt like wizardry.

Then I realized it’s just consistency — the same environment, everywhere.

Learn how to write a Dockerfile and deploy with Docker Compose or Fly.io.

That’s 90% of what you’ll ever need early on.

Kubernetes can wait — though it’s worth knowing why it exists.

🧠 AI Tip:

Let the AI write your Dockerfile, but read every line.

A single bad layer can bloat your image from 100MB to 1GB.

System Design: Don’t Overbuild — Yet

When I first started learning about queues, event buses, and load balancers, I felt like I’d unlocked a hidden level of engineering.

I wanted to use everything.

So I did — and my “simple” SaaS turned into a distributed Rube Goldberg machine.

My future self hated me for it.

Here’s the quiet truth about system design:

the more you know, the more dangerous you become.

Because knowledge tempts you to overengineer.

To solve problems you don’t have yet.

To optimize for scale that may never come.

But good design isn’t about sophistication — it’s about restraint.

It’s choosing clarity today over hypothetical performance tomorrow.

🧠 AI Tip:

Ask your coding assistant to sketch a simpler version of what you have in mind.

Say, “Can this work without queues?” or “Can we handle this in-process first?”

Sometimes the best architecture is the one that fits in your head.

Observability: See Before You Panic

The most painful bugs are the invisible ones.

You can’t fix what you can’t see.

Start simple: print logs, expose /healthz, and add uptime checks.

You don’t need fancy dashboards — just awareness.

🧠 AI Tip:

Ask your LLM to set up Sentry, logging middlewares, or structured logs.

AI is great at the boring setup — you handle the insights.

Shell & Scripting: Glue Everything Together

Bash saved me more times than I can count.

A simple script to restart a service, clean a directory, or back up a DB — these are invisible superpowers.

Learn your way around permissions, env vars, grep, and tmux.

This is what separates the “can’t deploy” dev from the “fixed it in 5 minutes” builder.

🧠 AI Tip:

Have AI generate shell scripts — but never run them blindly.

Understand before you execute.

Security: The Habit, Not the Skill

You might’ve noticed I didn’t give security its own section. That’s intentional.

It’s not a tool — it’s a habit.

Every time you touch authentication, data, or deployment, think:

“If this were compromised, what breaks?”

Use HTTPS. Hash passwords. Never hardcode secrets.

Most breaches come from negligence, not genius-level hacking. Something I like to call the ignorance debt.

Frameworks, Languages, and Everything Else

By now, someone will say, “But what about React? Django? Go? Rust? CI/CD?”

All valid. All secondary.

Frameworks are shortcuts, not foundations.

Languages are dialects — once you understand these fundamentals, syntax becomes trivia.

Testing, CI, and cloud scaling make sense only after you’ve shipped something worth scaling.

Learn these ten areas deeply, and AI suddenly becomes 10x more effective.

Because now, you know what to ask, what to skip, and when to stop it from hallucinating an entire microservice.

The Indie Dev Reality

Vibe coding isn’t about skipping the hard parts — it’s about sequencing them right.

AI gives you speed, but not direction.

These fundamentals are your compass.

Learn them once, and you’ll never fear new tools again.

Everything else — frameworks, language wars, fancy hosting — becomes optional flavor.

Because in the end, you don’t need to know everything.

You just need to know enough to ship, fix, and try again.