The Guide You Need But Won't Ask For

TL;DR: Setup is the moat most people never cross. 4-6 hours of integration hell builds the intuition everyone else pretends to have.

Yes, I ended the title with a preposition. It bothers me too. Moving on.

Two kids' basketball games and two birthday parties this weekend. Standard Seattle parent stuff. At every single one, conversations drifted to AI. Lawyers talking about Claude. A nanny asking about Cursor. Stay-at-home parents trading notes on image generators.

A bubble? Absolutely. LinkedIn has lost its mind. Your dentist wants to discuss prompt engineering.

Also a paradigm shift. Machine learning had a moment like this around 2012. The people who got their hands dirty early—even clumsily—built intuitions that compounded for a decade. Everyone else spent years catching up. Don't make the same mistake twice.

The barrier to entry has never been lower. But most people don't even know where to start. They use ChatGPT for recipes and email drafts and assume "building something real" is for developers. It's not. You can build real things now. You just need to understand a few concepts first.

This post is the orientation nobody gives you.

Why Bother

Intelligence mostly comes down to how good you are at extracting intuition from experience. Reading about databases teaches you nothing compared to debugging why your Supabase connection times out at 2am.

Your first project will burn 4-6 hours on setup. Environment variables. API keys. Auth flows. Deployment pipelines. You'll feel like you're spinning wheels.

You're not. You're building the mental model that makes everything else click. The second project takes 20 minutes because you finally understand what you're doing instead of copy-pasting from tutorials.

The Basics

Your code needs a home.

You wrote an app. It runs on your laptop. You're not leaving your MacBook open 24/7 for strangers to connect to. The code needs to live on a server—a computer that's always on, professionally maintained by people who do this for a living.

Vercel takes your code and runs it on their computers. Free to start, deployment feels like magic.

Computers need addresses.

Type "google.com" into your browser and your computer has no idea what that means. It translates the name into an IP address—something like 142.250.80.46—that actually routes somewhere.

DNS is the phone book of the internet. Buy a domain, point it at Vercel, and you've added an entry that says "when someone asks for chancekelch.com, send them here." You don't need to understand it deeply. Just know it exists, takes 10-60 minutes to propagate, and causes weird "site not loading" issues when it's slow.

We taught sand to think, but it can't remember shit.

Servers are stateless by default. Every visit is a first meeting. No memory of previous sessions, no stored preferences, nothing that survives a page refresh.

You want persistence? User accounts, saved content, anything durable? You need a database. Data lives on spinning metal (SSDs now, but the metaphor stands).

Supabase runs Postgres under the hood—one of the most popular databases on the internet—with a clean UI, built-in auth, and an API that works out of the box. Generous free tier.

Services talk through APIs.

Modern apps assemble from pieces. Supabase for your database. Stripe for payments. Resend for email. OpenAI for intelligence.

They communicate through APIs—standardized requests and responses—and authenticate with secrets: long random strings that prove you belong.

You'll spend a lot of time copying API keys between dashboards. Tedious, but also the unlock. Once you understand this pattern, adding a new capability means: get API key, add to environment variables, call the endpoint. Done.

GitHub saves your work.

More than backup. Version control tracks every change, lets you experiment without breaking what works, deploys automatically when you push.

The mental model: main is production, what users see. Feature branches are experiments. Commits are snapshots. Pull requests merge experiments back to main.

Start simple. Commit often, push to main, let Vercel auto-deploy. Graduate to branches when you're ready.

The Stack

Starting from zero:

Cursor — VS Code with AI built in. You'll live here.

GitHub — Industry standard, free, integrates with everything.

Vercel — Push code, get a URL.

Supabase — Postgres + Auth + API. One package.

Clerk (optional) — If you outgrow Supabase Auth.

Total cost: $0. Time to first deploy: 2-4 hours. Time to first deploy on your second project: 20 minutes.

The Tax

Your first time will take forever.

An hour figuring out why environment variables won't load. Cryptic CORS errors. Local app works, deployed version doesn't. You'll feel like you're making no progress.

Everyone pays this tax. You pay it once.

The Payoff

Payments? Stripe API key, 50 lines.

Email? Resend API key, 20 lines.

AI features? OpenAI key, 10 lines.

Every new capability is another API integration. With AI assistants, you describe what you want and get working code in minutes.

Setup is the moat. Cross it and you can build almost anything.

Go

You won't learn this from reading. Spin up a project. Hit the errors. Debug. Push through to that first deploy.

The intuition you build is worth more than any tutorial.

Start today.