u/Guilty-Pepper-8101

ok so I'm not a developer at all and I think I've genuinely lost it this week

I checked my Claude usage and apparently I've sent almost 8k messages in 4 days. it told me that's like 15x the word count of Moby Dick which made me feel insane. my peak hour is 8pm which tracks because I do not sleep anymore

the thing is it actually works? I've got a landing page live on my own domain, a little demo app with a working AI writer, and I somehow got an app approved on the App Store. working on a second one now

I don't write any code. I just tell it what I want like I'm explaining it to a coworker, and when stuff breaks I literally screenshot the error and go "fix this lol". works most of the time, breaks sometimes, but I'm shipping way faster than I have any right to

anyway is this normal or am I the only one going this hard. feels like cheating

Been heads-down on a React Native / Expo app since around March — luxury social + dating + events. Solo. Did all my own backend, API, deploys, device testing in the terminal. Months of nights-and-weekends, probably ~100+ hours total.

Tonight was supposed to be the easy part: "just submit it to the App Store." It was not the easy part. Five production builds in a row, each failing for a different reason. Posting the gauntlet because every one of these is googleable-but-painful and might save someone a night:

disk full mid-build. Cleared ~8GB of Xcode DerivedData + caches. (EAS builds in the cloud, so you don't need much local space — but you need some.)
node 18 vs node 20. u/firebase/ai requires node ≥20. My production profile pinned 18.20.4, so yarn install hard-failed the engine check. Bumped to 20.
Xcode 26 now mandatory. Apple requires Xcode 26+ for submissions as of Apr 28, 2026. Default EAS image was still Xcode 16 → the build literally cannot be submitted. Set ios.image: "latest" in eas.json.
warnings-as-errors under the new compiler. Xcode 26 is stricter; old pods threw deprecated-declaration errors. Added a Podfile post_install to disable GCC/SWIFT_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS + -Wno-error.
the boss fight: expo-localization — error: switch must be exhaustive. A Swift switch over Calendar.Identifier that the iOS 26 SDK added a case to. Had to dig through a 20MB Xcode log to find the one line, then patch-package an u/unknown default: into it.

Then, after a clean build, Apple rejected the upload because my version (2.2.0) was lower than a previously-approved 2.2.6 on the bundle ID. Bumped to 2.3.0. Resubmitted.

Result: Approved. 🎉

Lessons:

The build/release config is one-time pain. Future builds are now literally one command.
The hard 95% is the part nobody sees — backend, deploys, the messy middle. The "ship it" moment is the last 5%, but it'll humble you.
Read the actual logs. I almost guessed-and-rebuilt blindly; reading the real error each time meant 5 builds instead of 15.

If you're in the messy middle right now: keep going. The finish line is closer than it feels.

4.1M tokens in 4 days. I can't write a for loop but I just shipped 2 apps and a website.

a broken build approved in 6 hours is what actually blocks an Expo app from shipping and how to fix it