Dev Team Shares Honest Retrospective on Building AI Legal Tool Fair Fight

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A solo-founder team has published a detailed build retrospective for Fair Fight, a mobile-first legal education platform designed to help self-represented litigants organize case facts and understand legal issues in plain language. The app was built using TanStack Start, Clerk for authentication, Neon serverless Postgres, Stripe for one-time payments, and Gemini and Groq for AI-powered legal argument tools. The team emphasized a strict rule of never claiming a feature works until it is verified end-to-end, a principle that exposed several critical bugs during development. Among the key lessons were that TanStack Start API route handlers must be explicitly mounted via createFileRoute or they return 404 in production despite passing unit tests, and that Stripe webhooks require async signature verification to function correctly across all runtimes. The retrospective also highlighted the importance of deduplication logic for webhook events and smoke-testing live routes rather than relying solely on isolated handler tests.

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