Building in public means sharing the messy parts, not just the polished launch announcements.
Over the past week I've been building a paid deep audit for Roast My Plan: a fuller report on whether a plan can work, and what could sink it. It turned into a spiral of odd bugs, prompt errors, and fixes on top of fixes.
The worst of it was the money maths. Loan repayments, profit margins, how fast cash runs out under pressure. The AI was trying to work all of that out on the fly, and it didn't give the same answer twice.
On a site built on telling the plain truth, a sum that changes every time you ask is the fastest way to lose trust.
The decision: roll back and simplify
Instead of patching the patches, I stopped and rolled back six deployments. Then I changed three things.
1Back to what the tool is for
The AI's job isn't to be a calculator. It's to spot the risks in a plan: weak points in how it's built, reasons customers won't bite, and traps hiding in the day-to-day running of it.
2Maths goes in code, not in the AI
Repayments, margins and break-even points follow fixed rules. They belong in ordinary code that gives the same answer every time, not in an AI that's guessing its way to a number.
3Slower, but solid
Moving slowly with parts that work beats shipping shaky features quickly.
Where it stands
The free version of Roast My Plan is live and unaffected. The paid audit is back in development, rebuilt on the simpler design. It has earned nothing yet, and the ledger says so.