The biggest mistake I made building with AI (and how I fixed it)

I thought AI would speed everything up while building my SaaS.

In reality, it slowed me down at first.

Not because the models were bad — but because my workflow was.

I was doing:

→ ask → get code → assume it works

Which worked… until it didn’t.

The real issues only showed up when:

• something broke in production
• edge cases appeared
• or the system behaved differently than expected

The shift for me was changing the workflow to:

→ ask → generate → verify → refine → then use

And that “verify” step became everything.

Not manual checking — but actual validation:

• running checks
• enforcing structure
• catching failures early

Once that was in place, AI stopped feeling like guesswork and started feeling like an actual engineering tool.

Still early in this, but curious:

How are others handling verification when building with AI?

Are you relying on manual review, or building validation into your workflow?