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How I Built 54 Live Experiences With AI-Assisted Execution

I didn't write a single line of code. Here's how I built every one of them anyway — the workflow, the discipline, and the judgment calls that AI cannot make for me.

6 min read

I want to be precise about something before I start.

When I say I didn't write a single line of code, I mean it literally. Not "I barely wrote code." Not "I had help writing code." I cannot write JavaScript. I cannot write PHP. I'm a Product Owner who spent years writing requirements, not software.

And yet, I have shipped 54 live experiences here.

This article is about how that happened, exactly.

Where It Started

In 2024 I was running a sprint planning session for a fintech team. We needed to estimate a backlog of 14 stories. We were using physical cards, Fibonacci sequence, the whole ritual.

And I thought: there has to be a better way to do this for distributed teams.

So I described what I wanted to an AI — a digital planning poker tool where remote team members could simultaneously reveal their estimates. And 40 minutes later, I had a working prototype.

Not a wireframe. Not a mockup. A working HTML page I could open in a browser and use.

I stared at it for a while. Then I thought about every other problem I'd been solving manually for years.

The Workflow

Every tool followed the same five-step process:

Step 1: Identify the real problem

Not "I need a tool for X." The actual recurring pain. The question I kept answering manually. The calculation I kept doing in spreadsheets.

Step 2: Define the ideal output

What does "done" look like for this tool? What inputs does it need? What decision does the output support? I wrote this the same way I'd write a user story.

Step 3: Describe it to AI

A structured prompt: the problem, the user, the inputs, the calculations, the expected outputs, and the desired format. Specific and concrete.

Step 4: Test immediately

Open the file in a browser. Enter real values from a project I'd actually worked on. Does the output feel right? Does it match what an experienced practitioner would produce manually?

Step 5: Iterate to production quality

Most tools required 3–8 iterations. Not because the first version was broken — it usually worked mathematically. But "working" and "useful under real delivery pressure" are different things. I kept refining until I'd actually use it on a live project.

What Each Tool Actually Took

People assume these tools took months. They didn't. Here's a representative sample:

Tool First build Iterations Total time
RICE Prioritization Calculator Under 1 hour 4 ~2.5 hrs
Stakeholder Map Generator 50 min 6 ~4 hrs
User Story Slicer 45 min 5 ~3 hrs
Process Flow Diagrammer 1.5 hrs 8 ~6 hrs
Acceptance Criteria Generator 30 min 3 ~1.5 hrs
54 live experiences ~150 ~90 hrs

90 hours across 6 weeks, alongside full-time delivery work. A traditional development engagement for a tool suite this size would have been measured in months and tens of thousands in development costs.

What AI Is Actually Good At

AI is excellent at:

  • Translating structured logic into working interfaces
  • Applying consistent visual style across many components
  • Building the "plumbing" — form handling, calculations, state management
  • Generating variations quickly for testing
  • Implementing established patterns (Fibonacci sequence, RICE formula, Kano categories)

What it genuinely cannot do — at least not without significant human guidance:

  • Know whether the output of a calculation feels right to someone who has run that calculation on 50 real projects
  • Decide which edge cases matter in a delivery context
  • Judge whether the user experience matches the stress conditions under which the tool will actually be used
  • Know when a mathematically correct answer is practically useless

The 150 iterations across these tools were almost entirely about that second list. Not bugs. Domain judgment.

What Surprised Me

The biggest surprise was how directly my existing skills applied.

Writing a prompt to AI is structurally identical to writing a user story. You define the actor, the goal, the context, and the acceptance criteria. You include edge cases. You specify what "done" looks like.

The skills I'd spent years developing — precise problem definition, structured thinking, requirements elicitation, acceptance criteria writing — turned out to be exactly the skills that make AI prompts effective.

I needed to apply product and business analysis discipline in a new medium.

What This Changes

The traditional delivery workflow has a large gap between "I understand the problem" and "stakeholders can see a working version."

That gap used to be measured in weeks. Procurement, requirements review, development handoff, sprint planning, the build itself. By the time something existed that stakeholders could react to, the original problem had often shifted.

This workflow collapses that gap to hours. The prototype isn't production-ready. But it's enough to validate assumptions before committing engineering resources.

That's what these 54 live experiences actually demonstrate. Not that AI replaces developers — it absolutely doesn't — but that the feedback loop between problem and prototype has fundamentally changed.

The Technical Stack, If You're Curious

Everything here is intentionally simple:

Frontend

Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No frameworks. Intentional — I wanted every delivery practitioner to be able to look at the source and understand what they were looking at.

Backend

PHP for server-side rendering and the email results feature. Nothing exotic. A $5/month shared host could run this.

AI Tools Used

Claude Code (Anthropic) for the bulk of the build. Gemini AI Pro for long-context comparison and alternative reasoning approaches.

PDF Generation

jsPDF — client-side PDF creation from tool outputs. No server processing required for the export feature.

For Hiring Managers

This is what rapid, validated delivery looks like.

Delivery experience combined with an AI-augmented build capability means faster discovery, earlier validation, and less rework risk. I show the method through enterprise delivery examples: loan origination, payment processing, fintech platforms, and complex integrations.

Delivery practitioner? Every tool above was built using the workflow described in this article. Start with one of these:

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Topics Covered
54 live experiences AI-assisted building no-code product owner building without coding AI workflow for delivery tool prototyping product discovery method AI execution discipline practitioner AI use ship-or-kill criteria