9-Part Series
Building a Production SaaS Without Writing Code
The engineering decisions behind a 125,000-line platform built entirely with AI.
This series documents the real engineering challenges I encountered while building Capo, a multi-tenant SaaS platform, without writing any code by hand. Each article covers a specific problem, what made it harder than expected, and the architecture decisions that solved it.
These aren't tutorials. They're production war stories: what broke, why it broke, and what I learned about building serious software with AI as an accelerator rather than a replacement for engineering judgment.
The Series
Specs Are the Real Skill Behind AI Coding
Why 45,000 lines of specifications matter more than prompts when building with AI.
Why I Turned Off PostgreSQL Row-Level Security in Production
How connection pooling broke the RLS policies and what I built instead.
Retrofitting Multi-Tenancy Into a Live App
Adding tenant_id to 33 tables and 70+ API routes without breaking production.
Why I Made the Database Crash Loudly
How fail-fast patterns prevent silent cross-tenant data leaks.
Race Conditions in Booking Systems (and How I Fixed Them)
What happens when five players click Book for the last spot at the same time.
I Replaced 11 Serverless Functions With One Worker
From 45-second blocking requests to instant responses with background processing.
How Small Performance Fixes Add Up to 85% Faster
Why 300+ duplicate requests became 30, and what that did to load times.
How I Used a Genetic Algorithm to Balance Teams
The hardest feature to build with AI, and the 15 iterations it took to get right.
How I Built a SaaS Demo Without Touching the Database
Why static JSON exports beat live tenant switching for demo modes.
About the project
Capo started as a way to organise a weekly football game and grew into a full platform: stats, RSVPs, payments, AI-balanced teams, native mobile apps. 125,000 lines of code, 149 API routes, 60+ database tables. Built in spare time over 14 months by someone who'd never written production code before. See how Capo works.