I Built a Working Tool in 4 Hours (And Nearly Destroyed It With These 4 Rookie Mistakes)
Your idea doesn't need to be revolutionary. It doesn't need to change the world. It just needs to work.
The Rush That Almost Ruined Everything
You know that feeling when an idea hits you at 2 AM and suddenly you can’t sleep? That was me last Tuesday. I had this nagging problem—tracking Crypto ETFs was a mess of spreadsheets and browser tabs—and I finally decided: screw it, I’m building something TODAY.
Four hours later, I had a working tool. But here’s the thing nobody tells you: those four hours included at least two hours of completely avoidable chaos that almost made me quit.
If you’ve been sitting on a side project idea, procrastinating because you think you need the “perfect approach,” let me save you some pain. Here are the four mistakes that nearly killed my project before it could breathe.
Mistake #1: I Coded First, Planned Never
The Problem: I dove straight into writing code because I was excited. Every five minutes, I’d think of a “critical feature” that suddenly became urgent. Want to add real-time alerts? Sure! How about historical comparisons? Why not! Social sharing? Absolutely essential!
The Reality Check: Half of those “urgent needs” were just dopamine-fueled excitement masquerading as product requirements.
What I Should Have Done:
- Spent 15 minutes writing down the ONE problem I was solving
- Listed the absolute minimum features needed to solve it
- Saved the shiny add-ons for version 2.0
The Lesson: Your future self will thank you for those 15 minutes of planning. Random excitement is a terrible product manager.
Mistake #2: I Made It Pretty Before I Made It Work
The Problem: I spent hours designing a gorgeous interface with perfect color schemes and smooth animations. Meanwhile, my backend was held together with prayer and console.log statements.
The Brutal Truth: Nobody cares how beautiful your button animations are if clicking them returns an error.
What Actually Works:
- Get the data flowing first
- Make the core functionality work (even if it’s ugly)
- Test with real data
- THEN make it pretty
The Lesson: Data first, pretty stuff later. Always. A working prototype beats a beautiful wireframe every single time.
Mistake #3: I Went Live Without Testing Locally
The Big Oops: I was so excited to see my tool “in the wild” that I started switching between Claude models mid-project, testing different configurations in production, and basically treating my live environment like a playground.
The Chaos That Followed:
- Broken features that worked five minutes ago
- Configurations that worked in one model but failed in another
- No clear way to roll back when things went sideways
The Smart Approach:
- Test everything locally first
- Lock in your model and configuration
- Only push to live when you’re confident it works
- Keep a backup of your last working version
The Lesson: Your live environment is not a laboratory. Test locally, deploy confidently.
Mistake #4: I Thought I Was Too Smart for Documentation
The Problem: I saw the documentation for Antigravity and Claude Opus. I skimmed it. Then I thought, “I’ve done this kind of thing before, I can figure it out faster my own way.”
Narrator: He could not figure it out faster his own way.
The Humbling Truth: Following the docs exactly sounds boring, but my “creative” shortcuts actually slowed me down. Every time I tried to be clever, I hit a wall and had to backtrack to do it the documented way anyway.
What I Learned:
- Read the getting started guide completely
- Follow the examples exactly as written first
- THEN customize once you understand the patterns
- Bookmark the API reference—you’ll need it more than you think
The Lesson: Documentation exists because hundreds of people made the same mistakes before you. Learn from their pain, not your own.
What Actually Worked: The Tech Stack That Saved Me
Once I stopped fighting myself, progress was surprisingly smooth:
- Antigravity with Claude Opus handled the heavy lifting
- Github MCP for version control (which saved me when I broke things)
- Custom subdomains to make it feel like a real product
- Focus on one problem: Tracking Crypto ETFs without the spreadsheet nightmare
The tool works now. It’s not perfect, but it solves my actual problem. And that’s the whole point.
The Real Lesson: Done Beats Perfect
Here’s what nobody tells you about building things: you’re going to mess up. You’ll waste time on the wrong features. You’ll break things that were working. You’ll ignore advice and learn why it was advice in the first place.
But you’ll also learn faster than any tutorial, course, or bootcamp could ever teach you.
Building teaches you:
- How to prioritize when everything feels important
- Why best practices actually exist
- How to debug your own thinking, not just your code
- That “good enough and shipping” beats “perfect and planning”
The Bottom Line
I turned a random idea into a working Crypto ETF tracker in four hours. I made mistakes that cost me time. But the tool exists now, and I learned more in those four hours than I did in the previous month of “thinking about building something.”
Your idea doesn’t need to be revolutionary. It doesn’t need to change the world. It just needs to work.
So stop reading blog posts about building things (yes, including this one) and go build something.