What I learned building OnePage, my first AI project

OnePage was the first thing I ever built with AI. I'm a Senior Product Manager, not an engineer, and the idea (a simple AI-powered task management app) was really an excuse to find out whether I could turn "I understand agentic AI at a product level" into "I have actually shipped something." Replit made that possible in a way that would have been out of reach for me otherwise.

I didn't know a lot going in. I remember how much I had to look up that a more experienced developer would have taken for granted: how a frontend talks to a backend, what a database migration even is, why my app worked perfectly in one session and broke mysteriously in the next. None of it was exotic. It was the ordinary texture of building software, and I was running into most of it for the first time.

What surprised me was how much of building OnePage turned out to be product thinking wearing a different hat. Deciding what "done" meant for a task. Deciding how forgiving the interface should be when someone typed something ambiguous. Those were product decisions I was already equipped to make. The code around them was the part I had to learn, usually by getting it wrong first.

I also had to get comfortable not knowing things. There's a specific discomfort in asking a tool to explain something you suspect you should already understand, and I had to get over that quickly or I wasn't going to finish anything. Curiosity turned out to be more useful than confidence.

OnePage is still running today. It has since moved off Replit onto Railway, alongside my other projects, as I've kept building. It's not a polished product, and I don't think it needs to be. To me it's the first time I closed the loop between having opinions about AI product work and actually doing it. Every project since has been easier because of what OnePage forced me to learn the hard way.

If you're a PM curious about building something yourself, start smaller than you think you need to, and expect to feel like a beginner for longer than feels comfortable. It's worth it.

Try OnePage: live app · code on GitHub