AI making code cheaper to produce doesn’t make the decisions around it any cheaper. What to build, for whom, and why — that’s still fully on you. It should free up more time for strategy, user understanding, and saying “no” to things that shouldn’t exist regardless of how easy they are to ship.

The maintainability concern Orhun raises is real, but I think the root cause isn’t AI — it’s ownership. If you don’t understand what was built, you can’t evolve it. It’s the same failure mode as a PM who doesn’t grasp the technical implementation — they end up proposing expensive features that fight the architecture instead of working with it. Eventually, someone has to pay for that disconnect, and it’s usually the team

The one place I'd push back on SQLite: if your app has any write concurrency from external processes (cron jobs, webhooks), WAL mode helps but you still hit lock contention. I have data collection scripts running every 30 minutes that write to the same DB the web app reads from. Postgres handled that cleanly from day one. Neon's free tier is 512MB with connection pooling — more than enough for a side project with real data.