I'm a maxillofacial surgeon in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso — and a self-taught builder who's been coding since medical school. Over evenings and weekends, I shipped Readium — a production AI reading app that lets you discuss books with Claude while you read them, in any language. Built AI-paired with Claude, reviewed and deployed by me. Most "I shipped an AI app" write-ups cover the happy path: clone a starter, glue an LLM, deploy to Vercel. The walls I hit weren't there. They were in the spaces between the libraries. Here are five of them — and what I'd tell myself a few weeks ago. Wall 1 — SSE streaming broke at the seam between the LLM and the browser I assumed streaming "just worked" once OpenRouter returned a stream. It does — until your server-side handler, your reverse proxy, or your browser code introduces a buffer somewhere along the path.…