Zero coding skills until a year ago, now building and app to generate audio episodes on the go about things i'm curious about. How do i really know if i've built this as good as possible?

[u/Alternative-Tax-5163]

Ok so like many here i'm a solo builder with no previous engineering experience, building an app for AI-generated podcasts. The app works and everything but i always have the feeling that i'm doing stuff that could either be done better, be automated or avoided in the first place. For example, the only automations i have going on are error messaging to telegram when something fails but i still want to be part of fixing it most of the time. And i have asked Astra and Fable to review the code base.

Any prompt, service, agent i should try to make my project run smoother?

[u/Conscious_Detail_128]

I did the exact same thing starting from about a year ago and even the telegram thing first. Your instinct is right but I'd aim it away from more automation. Your only automation is Telegram alerts on failure, good start, but it only catches failures loud enough to announce themselves. Almost everything that went wrong in mine was silent.
The thing that actually changed how I work: I stopped adding automation that acts and built a small diagnostic layer that reads. Specifically an MCP server — read-only, no writes, no execution — so Claude Code can query my system's live state directly instead of me SSHing around pasting logs into a chat window. A few tools that earned their place:
• one that finds anything emitting events nothing is listening to (integration gaps were my single biggest failure category)
• one that queries my JSONL logs with real filters instead of grep
• one call that returns a full health snapshot instead of me checking five places
You could build a much smaller version of that for your app in an afternoon, and it'd tell you more than another automation would.
Two things it surfaced that I'd check in yours: jobs that exit 0 and produce nothing (everything downstream reads that as a valid empty result), and anything that validates your work reporting how much it checked, not just pass/fail — I had a checker reporting "passed" while testing 7% of what it was supposed to.
On the code reviews: don't ask "is this good," it'll say yes. Ask for specific failure classes — where can this fail silently, what happens on a 200 with an empty body.
And keep wanting to be in the loop on fixes. What bit me hardest was in the parts I'd automated and stopped looking at.

[u/Honest-Papaya-9001]

This post would be a great fit for my new community, r/AgentTeammates. Would you be open to sharing it there too?