Building SERVE With AI: The Night I Nearly Scrapped the Whole Thing

I didn’t set out to build SERVE because I needed another project. I built it because I was tired of watching services organizations suffer through the same painful cycle: inconsistent estimation, padded pricing, tribal-knowledge proposals, outdated templates buried in inboxes, inaccurate projections, and messy handoffs. So SERVE became my attempt to fix something nobody else seemed interested in fixing.

In simple terms, it is our system for estimating work, pricing it fairly, generating proposals and SOWs, handing everything to resource management, and continuously improving through machine learning that compares estimated hours to actuals. It is not flashy. It is not a platform. It is the plumbing that makes a services business run without chaos.

The Migration From Hell

There was a night, close to midnight, when a migration script kept failing. Same error, over and over. I was tired, irritated, and questioning every life choice that led me to be debugging Prisma migrations after hours instead of doing something normal with my evening.

Codex kept suggesting fixes. And I kept swatting them away, stubbornly convinced I was right.

It turned out the bug was a single invisible character, the kind of tiny mistake you can only find after you have gone through emotional stages usually associated with losing a relationship.

When it finally worked, I laughed. The kind of laugh that is 40 percent relief and 60 percent “I cannot believe I spent three hours arguing with an AI.”

The Terminator, Minus the Murder

Codex didn’t get annoyed. It didn’t sulk. It didn’t decide to try again tomorrow. It didn’t care that I was tired or cranky. It just kept offering ideas, calmly and relentlessly, like the Terminator if the Terminator’s mission was to nudge a sleep-deprived human toward productivity.

Meanwhile, I was doing normal human things:

• doubting myself
• getting frustrated
• threatening to burn the whole repo down
• refreshing Stack Overflow like a security blanket

Codex didn’t flinch. And that, strangely enough, kept me going.

What AI Actually Did

AI didn’t architect SERVE. AI didn’t magically make me a genius. What it did was expand my endurance. It unblocked me. It kept me from quitting when irritation usually wins. It made the work feel less lonely during the hard parts.

The Realization

Here is the truth nobody says out loud: AI will not turn a beginner into a senior engineer, but it will turn a capable problem solver into someone who can build a full MVP. A real one. One worth handing to a senior team.

That matters. It matters for businesses, for speed, for capability building, and honestly, for anyone who has ever sat alone late at night wondering whether an idea is worth finishing. Because sometimes all you need is a partner who doesn’t get tired.