Developer field guide

Steward your live app through its first ninety days with one calm half hour a week.

Keep It Running — Maintaining Your AI-Built App Through Its First Ninety Days

24 pages Screen-friendly A5, prints on A4 and US Letter Read on screen, or print Last reviewed July 2026 Version 2026-07

You shipped something by describing it to an AI, and now real people use it — and you are responsible for code you did not write. This 24-page field guide to the first ninety days after launch is written for owners rather than engineers: five small skills — reading logs, backups you have actually restored, small fixes, and calm updates — folded into one weekly half hour that prevents most emergencies. The tone throughout is stewardship, not emergency.

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Cover of Keep It Running — Previews show each page at reduced resolution; the download is the full print-quality PDF.

What's inside

The steward's notebook: a plain-text facts page and running diary — steward.md — that answers the only three questions maintenance ever asks (is it up, can a user do the main thing, is the data safe)
Reading logs without reading much code: where your logs actually live, the three parts of a log line, and a real error trace walked through line by line
Backups that actually restore: where your data really lives, the one-command backup, and the restore drill that proves the copy works before you need it
Small fixes in code you didn't write: the four-rule method — reproduce, smallest change, verify, commit — plus the two-strikes rollback move and the one rule with no exceptions: never edit the live app in a panic
Updating without fear: security fixes promptly, everything else on a monthly window, and the dependency nobody lists — the AI model name written into your code that its vendor will one day retire
The weekly half hour: a thirty-minute routine, minute by minute across six slots, plus one free uptime monitor for the days between
Paying down the mess: one small refactor at a time, chosen by pain, never mixed with a fix
Repair or rebuild: the honest decision framework with worked time-and-cost math, and the third option nobody mentions — retiring an app well
What growth breaks first: free-tier quotas, slow queries, support load, and the single point of you
A plain-language glossary of every maintenance term the book uses

Who it's for

Owners of a live AI-built app who did not write the code they are now responsible for
Anyone who wants a weekly routine instead of emergency firefighting

Who it's not for

Career engineers looking for deep operations essays — this is written for owners, not engineers
Anyone whose app has no users yet — ship first; this book starts the day real people arrive

Leans on tools with real free tiers, and says plainly where a paid tier matters — for instance Supabase's daily backups sit on its Pro plan, and UptimeRobot's free plan is for personal, non-commercial use. The examples work through an AI coding assistant that may require a paid plan (from roughly $20/month as of July 2026). Prices, free tiers, and platform screens were last reviewed July 2026 against the vendors' own pages. A routine improves your odds; it does not remove them.

Guidance, not gospel — this is a practical organisation tool, not legal, tax, medical, or religious authority.