Lessons from a Bubble Migration
The engineering decisions behind rebuilding an AI hiring decisioning platform from Bubble.io to production on Next.js + AWS — in 8 working days. What the disciplines look like when the economics change.
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70 data models. 30 production pages. 200 workflows. Rebuilt from Bubble to Next.js on AWS in 8 working days.
The engineering hasn’t changed. The economics have.
This series follows one real migration — an AI hiring decisioning platform — from the first planning session through the audit. Each part isolates one engineering discipline (requirements, design, security, operations, AI architecture, owner independence) and shows what it looks like when a small team with AI tooling executes at the scale of a department.
The throughline: engineering is a decision-making discipline, not a typing discipline. AI changed the typing. It didn’t change the decisions.
- 01 You Don’t Have a Code Problem. You Have a Requirements Problem. Why 19 PRD documents come before a single line of production code — and why AI amplifies the cost of vague requirements rather than reducing it. →
- 02 Why Your App Needs a Blueprint, Not a Prototype 23 UI pages as standalone mockups in the production tech stack — not Figma — before writing any backend code. Why a migration is a redesign opportunity, not a feature-for-feature port. →
- 03 From Bubble to Production: The 8-Day Migration Recipe The phase-by-phase recipe that compressed a 12-month rebuild into 8 working days — and why the sequencing discipline matters more than the AI speed. →
- 04 You Left Bubble. Now What? The Responsibilities Nobody Mentions Owning your security, deployment, monitoring and operations after the no-code platform stops doing them for you — and why managed services + AI make the overhead a fraction of what it used to be. →
- 05 Twelve AI Features, Zero Vendor Lock-In AI features as infrastructure, not magic. Prompts in the database, model-agnostic routing, admin-editable without deploys, usage tracking and cost visibility. →
- 06 The Product Owner Who Can Ship Without You The real test of a migration isn’t whether the code is modern — it’s whether the product owner can maintain and evolve it without specialist help. →
Engineering is a decision-making discipline. AI changed the typing. It didn’t change the decisions.
Start with Part 1 →