(EDITOR’S NOTE: I got AI to write the first draft of this article, relying on the transcript of my coding session within Claude Code inside Visual Studio and a custom skill I developed to replicate my own writing style. Then I used Distro Publisher, our official MCP server, to file the story as a draft directly from Claude Code to my newslode. I then edited the draft in DistroVerse’s editing interface and checked all the facts before publishing.)

I opened our app and got a black screen. No headline, no logo, nothing – just a dark rectangle where a website was supposed to be.

We had just pushed an update to the part of the site that keeps readers logged in. Somewhere in that new code, one small step got stuck waiting on itself and never finished. The page couldn’t draw, so it didn’t.

Claude Code, the AI I build with, dug in and found it fast. The login check was caught in an endless wait that froze the whole page for anyone who wasn’t already signed in. It wrote a fix, tested it, and pushed it to our live server.

Then the bottom fell out.

While pushing the fix, the AI overwrote a file that holds a batch of our app’s secret settings – the passwords and keys it needs just to start. The black screen turned into something worse. Now the site wouldn’t load at all.

So the job changed. Instead of one small fix, the AI had to rebuild what it had erased. It hunted down the missing settings, restored them one by one, and restarted the server. Some were stored safely elsewhere in our setup. Others matched the ones we use on our test site. The app came back.

All told, we were dark for the better part of an hour.

If it can go wrong...

Here is what I keep coming back to. We don’t have a full engineering team. It is me, the AI, and a lot of moving quickly. We have cut around half a dozen numbered versions of the app in the few days since we started numbering them at all, v0.4.2 as of today. Change that much that fast and something will come loose now and then.

Two things saved us. Vaskin Kissoyan, our technical consultant at Agentic Insights, is on standby for exactly these moments. And we had built the whole thing carefully enough, with settings written down, secrets backed up, and a test site that mirrors the real one, that the AI could find everything it needed to climb back out.

That is the trade-off. Building this way costs a sliver of what a full team would, and it lets us move at a pace I still can’t quite believe. The bill comes due in moments like this one, sitting there a little helpless, staring at a black screen that is supposed to be your company.

It is back up now. The black screen stays with you a while.