Behind every page on this site — the vetting application, the Foundations curriculum, the Yes/No/Maybe checklist, the incident reporting workflow, the mentor matching, the badges, the staff-role training — I want to be straight about something:
an AI wrote most of the code, working alongside me as the architect.
This was the only way to get here. A platform that does what this one does — encrypted vetting records, audit logging, role-based access, scheduled emails, automated quiz grading, an end-to-end-tested integration with our calendar and group tools — is normally the output of a small engineering team working for a year to eighteen months. Quoted at market rate, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of
$400,000–$600,000 in development costs, plus ongoing maintenance.
To put real numbers on it: the site is roughly
125,000 lines of application code —
nearly 200,000 counting the database migrations, the quiz banks, and the Tales storyline. On top of the code, there's
more than 70,000 words of documentation — the handbooks, the policies, the Foundations curriculum, the FAQ and glossary — about the length of a novel. Every push triggered an automated check;
more than 1,000 runs over the build so far. Behind those sits an
80-file test suite that verifies the whole platform end to end: submitting applications, grading quizzes, walking the story, filing test incidents, running the vetting flow start to finish. By hand, one full pass is the better part of a day — and it runs every time anything changes. Conservatively, that's hundreds of hours of manual testing the machine absorbed so I could move fast without breaking what already worked.
I had a budget of zero, a small community, and a timeline measured in weeks. So I built it with AI as my coding partner.
One person, with one collaborator, shipped what would have taken a team a year.
What that's gotten us
- A vetting workflow that actually screens applicants — built in days, not months.
- An end-to-end-encrypted notes system so vetters can document concerns without leaking PII.
- An incident response framework, with cross-venue alerts and reporter privacy baked in.
- The Foundations consent and safety curriculum — lessons, quizzes, badges, and automatic group memberships once you pass.
- A Yes/No/Maybe checklist and a Scene Negotiation tool to compare interests with a partner before a scene.
- Tales — a choose-your-own-path story that teaches consent and community norms by letting you live the decisions, not just read about them.
- Mentor matching — newcomers paired with an experienced member and connected privately from day one, so there's someone to ask the awkward questions while you wait.
- A member home base — log in and see exactly where you stand: your vetting status, the classes you have left, and what's coming up.
- A volunteer staff-role workflow — apply, train, take a quiz, get approved — so we can grow our team without losing track of who's been trained on what.
- A one-tap quick-exit button on every page and a full accessibility pass — keyboard navigation, screen-read
