NEO (my AI coach app) has been down for longer than I promised.
I said 4 days of downtime.
It's now day 5, and it's still not back up.
What happened: I couldn't solve the deployment issues myself.
The Replit AI agent couldn't figure it out either.
Replit's support takes 1.5-2 days to respond, so I hired an expert to look into it.
He told me 4 days, but failed to deliver.
As I’m reflecting on this, I was faced with two difficult choices.
A) I could keep trying to find someone who can handle the complex migration, or
B) I could rebuild it from scratch using Replit-native tools that I can actually deploy with.
Both are uncertain, with no guarantees.
But I chose the rebuild.
It’s guaranteed to be more pain in the ass.
But it makes me less dependent on finding the right expert every time something breaks.
NEO was originally built on Vercel, Supabase, and Google Auth.
In hindsight, migrating all of that to Replit at once created too many moving parts.
I was coding everything in preview mode, assuming preview worked the same as deployment.
It doesn't.
I will note this down as a part of vibe coding 101 main lessons from this saga.
My new approach follows a build → test → deploy strategy.
First, start with a basic site that does nothing
Add one small tiny feature
Test to ensure it can actually work
Deploy immediately
This way, if something goes wrong, we can narrow it down to what was done and quickly isolate the root cause.
Each phase can then actually deploy, not just preview.
I'm currently at Phase 5 of the migration. There’s 8 phases in total.
I’ll need to get to the point where NEO actually deploys and all of you can see your credit, before I make any further improvements.
I don't have a specific timeline for when NEO will be back up.
I'm working through it systematically.
But I can promise to update you whenever there's real progress to report.
The upside: once this is done, every phase of NEO will be deployable and testable independently.
That makes future updates faster and more reliable.
Thanks for your patience.
FELIX