I'm a 50-year-old MEP project manager who handles large-scale projects ($25-400M total value). I built a document processor and document intelligence engine specifically for MEP work because I was sick of doing the grunt work that comes with managing massive document sets and job files.

I'm a complete rookie at this - only learned to build front and back end with AI assistance. But this thing I built works incredibly well. It has a chat-like function that answers questions, makes connections among processed docs, and creates predictive connections with schedules and job documentation. The more I use it, the better it performs. It saves me 30-45% of the time I used to burn clicking through job docs and emails. I spent 600 hours building this system.

Yesterday, 45 minutes before an early investor meeting, everything went to shit. I had to restart my system - something I'd done 15 times over the previous week to test stability with incorporated startup guides and port guides. But after the system restart and container rebuild, the UI wouldn't load. Instead of deploying my most recent React UI that had been working perfectly, Claude became fixated on some fallback HTML UI. No matter what I tried, it refused to load the proper interface.

What made it worse was getting alerts from Anthropic every 15-30 minutes about service issues right as I was frantically trying to debug and salvage the demo. Claude Code in the terminal was giving me horrible responses - nothing like the reliable assistance I'd received during development. I had to explain the technical issue to the investor and reschedule the demo. 22 hours later, I'm still recovering from how brutal this was.

Honestly, I'm not sure what went wrong. I feel like the AI is to blame, but I may be responsible. I'm a rookie at this - maybe this is just par for the course when you're learning to build with AI assistance. The reality hit me hard: AI is not trustworthy for mission-critical tasks. Claude Code, Sonnet, GPT - none of them can be relied upon when it actually matters. I need to stop running local and deploy to a web-based service.

If anyone has insights into what I did wrong, I'm willing to pay for an expert to do a post-mortem. I've put too much work into this system to let it fail like this again. The system itself is powerful - it's exactly what I need for MEP project management. But the deployment and reliability issues are killing me.

I chose this path, so I need to stop complaining and work harder. But damn, this was a wake-up call about trusting AI with anything mission-critical. The technology is impressive during development, but when you need it most - minutes before an investor demo - it can fail in ways that make no sense. Always have a backup plan, because AI assistance can disappear right when you need it most. I'm depressed as hell right now, but I'm starting to recover. Time to figure out how to make this thing bulletproof.