I built a Node.js engine at 17 after AI code broke my auth.
I’m 17. I love building things. And I hate losing days to bugs that shouldn’t exist.
A few months ago, I was working on my first real website. Nothing crazy – just a small website with login, a few API calls from Gemini’s free tier, and a dashboard. I used Google AI Studio to generate most of the code because I thought it would work. I didn’t know much coding back then.
But it didn’t work. Small surprise for a first timer.
The auth did not work. If it works by chance, then only on desktop, not on mobile, due to different levels of coding (by AI, basically vibe coding at that time).
That’s when I realized: AI is great at writing spaghetti. It’s terrible at writing reliable backends.
I started digging – but I didn't know where to start. So I used deep research tools to understand why Stripe webhooks fail silently (idempotency keys) and why jobs just vanish in production (BullMQ dead-letter queues). The tools taught me. I just had to ask the right questions.
After 1.5 months of late nights and no caffeine (I don’t drink coffee, haha), I had something that worked. A Node.js engine that handles:
- Auth that doesn’t randomly break
- Idempotent webhooks (no double charges)
- BullMQ queues with dead-letter recovery
- LLM cost limits (per user, per hour)
- 1,239 passing tests, 95%+ coverage
I called it the KeelStack Engine. It’s the backend I wish I had when AI code let me down.
Right now, there’s a live demo: engine-demo.keelstack.me
And a GitHub repo with a reference UI (not the backend—the backend is a paid product I’m building).
If you’ve ever lost a weekend to a broken webhook, a stalled BullMQ job, or AI-generated auth that randomly 401s, I’d love to hear your experience.
Try the demo. Break it. Tell me what sucks.
I’m building this in public because I believe other founders shouldn’t waste weeks on problems that have already been solved.
Thanks for reading.
Drop a comment or DM me – ask anything. I'll reply to everyone..
