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Every EasySpawn article, newest first — deploying AI-built apps, Claude Code, databases, security, and the infrastructure underneath.
217 posts · page 9 of 9
How to Choose an AI App Builder: Seven Questions to Ask First
Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, and a dozen others all promise an app from a prompt. Features change monthly, so instead of a ranking, here are the seven questions that decide whether a builder suits your project — and what to check before you commit months of work to one.
What Is Caching? A Beginner's Guide to Making Apps Faster
Caching means keeping a copy of something so you don't have to fetch or compute it again. The caches between your user and your database — browser, CDN, server, database — what each is good for, why 'hard refresh' fixes things, and the one hard problem: stale data.
Preventing Cache Stampedes: Coalescing, Locks, Early Expiration, and Stale Serving
When a hot cache key expires, hundreds of requests miss at once and all hit the database. How stampedes happen, and the fixes: singleflight coalescing, distributed locks, probabilistic early recomputation (XFetch), stale-while-revalidate, TTL jitter, and negative caching.
Browser Developer Tools for Beginners: The Five Tabs That Matter
Every browser has a built-in toolkit that shows what your app is really doing. How to open DevTools, and how to use the Elements, Console, Network, Application, and device-mode views to find bugs and give your AI tool something useful to work with.
Which Database Should an AI-Built App Use?
The AI will happily pick a database for you — sometimes a file on disk that disappears on the next deploy. What the choice actually is, why Postgres is the right default for almost every app, and the mistakes that lose data.
Backups for Beginners: How to Not Lose Your App's Data
Your code is in Git. Your users' data isn't. What actually needs backing up, the 3-2-1 rule, why a backup you've never restored doesn't count, how often to back up, and a simple backup plan for a small app — including what to do before letting an AI agent near your database.
Your App Needs Background Jobs. Here's the Simplest Way to Add Them.
Sending emails, processing uploads, calling slow AI models, and nightly cleanups don't belong in the middle of a web request. What background jobs and scheduled tasks are, the simplest reliable way to add them — often your existing Postgres database — and the mistakes that make jobs fail silently.
Authentication vs Authorization: What's the Difference?
Authentication checks who you are. Authorization checks what you're allowed to do. Mixing them up is behind many of the worst security holes in AI-built apps. A plain-English explanation with the hotel analogy, the mistakes to look for, and a five-minute test.
API Pagination: Offset vs Cursor (Keyset) and When Each Breaks
Returning every row works until it doesn't. How offset pagination works and why it gets slow and skips rows, how cursor (keyset) pagination fixes both, how to encode cursors and index for them, tie-breakers, total counts, and a response shape clients can rely on.
Anatomy of a URL: What Every Part of a Web Address Means
https://app.example.com:8080/orders/42?sort=new#details has seven parts, and each one matters when you build an app. The scheme, subdomain, domain, port, path, query string, and fragment, explained — plus URL encoding and why some characters turn into %20.
Analytics for Beginners: What to Measure in Your First App
You launched. Is anyone using it? What web analytics and product analytics are, the handful of numbers that matter for a new app, privacy-friendly tools that don't need a cookie banner, how to track events, and how not to drown in dashboards.
AI Hallucinated a Package: Fake Libraries, Made-Up APIs, and Slopsquatting
AI coding tools sometimes invent packages, functions, and settings that don't exist — and attackers now register the fake package names. Why it happens, how to spot hallucinated imports and APIs, what 'slopsquatting' is, and the habits that keep invented code out of your app.
Egress Control for AI Agents: Designing an Allowlist Proxy
Restricting where an agent can send data is the most reliable defence against exfiltration, and easy to get subtly wrong. Network-layer enforcement, SNI vs TLS interception, DNS as a covert channel, allowlisted domains as leak paths, credential brokering, and testing.
How to Add Stripe Payments to an AI-Built App Without Getting Burned
AI tools will happily wire up Stripe in a way that looks finished and lets anyone pay $0.01 for your product. The four rules that make payments safe — server-side prices, verified webhooks, idempotent fulfilment, and a real live-mode test — explained without the jargon.
How to Add Login to an AI-Built App (Without Building It Yourself)
Authentication is the one feature you should never let an AI write from scratch. What 'login' actually involves, the three sensible ways to add it, and the checks that tell you whether the login your AI tool built is protecting anything at all.
Web Accessibility Basics: Making Your App Usable by Everyone
Accessibility means people using screen readers, keyboards, magnification, or captions can use your app too. The common failures in AI-built apps — missing labels, div buttons, poor contrast, keyboard traps — how to test for them in ten minutes, and the prompts that fix them.
The Sandbox Is the Wrong Abstraction for AI Coding Agents
The industry settled on ephemeral sandboxes for AI agents — isolated, disposable, destroyed after each task. That's exactly right for running untrusted code and exactly wrong for building software. Here's the distinction that matters.
Leaving Gitpod: Where Cloud Dev Environments Went in 2026
Gitpod Classic shut down in October 2025 and the product became Ona, an AI-agent platform on a new runtime. If that broke your workflow, here's an honest map of the alternatives and what to check before you migrate.
Why Your AI Agent Keeps Forgetting (And Why Bigger Context Windows Won't Fix It)
Your coding agent works brilliantly for twenty minutes, then forgets the architecture you explained. That's not a bug you can prompt your way out of — and million-token windows won't save you. What actually helps.
You Built an App With AI. Now What?
The AI wrote your app in an afternoon. Getting it online, with a real database, that doesn't leak your API keys, is where most people get stuck. A plain-English guide to what happens after the code exists.
The Real Cost of a Cloud Development Environment
Sticker price is the smallest part of what a cloud development environment costs — and the laptop it replaces was never free either. A model for working out whether the numbers actually favour you.
Why AI Coding Agents Need Persistent Workspaces
Stateless sandboxes make AI agents repeat themselves, lose context, and guess at results they could have measured. Persistent workspaces fix the feedback loop — here's the mechanism, and what it costs to build.
What Is an Autonomous Development Platform?
An Autonomous Development Platform gives AI agents and developers a persistent, managed environment to build in — not just a place to generate code. Here's what separates the category from AI code generators, PaaS, and cloud IDEs.
Docker vs Linux Users for Multi-Tenant Workspace Isolation
Separate Linux users look like a cheap way to isolate tenants until you try to enforce a CPU limit. A walkthrough of why containers win for multi-tenant development workspaces — and how to verify the limits are real.
Cloud Development Environments vs Local Setup: An Honest Comparison
Cloud development environments fix onboarding, parity, and machine sprawl — and introduce latency, cost, and offline problems. A practical breakdown of when each one wins, without the vendor spin.