Please… Enough with the Sloppy, One-Shot SaaS Replacements — Mahmoud Abdelwahab, Railway

A single internal app now handles Railway's marketing content, email, social posts, media, creator relationships and launch planning. Mahmoud Abdelwahab built it with coding agents, but getting the features to run was only the beginning. The difference between a quick SaaS replacement and a tool his team wants to open every day lives in the details: background saving, responsive interactions, reversible actions and consistent screens. His starting point is a structured codebase with reusable abstractions, so each new feature follows existing patterns instead of inventing another way to do the same work. Abdelwahab works through the product behaviors he has learned to request explicitly. Autosave should preserve progress without blocking typing; optimistic updates should make suitable actions feel immediate and recover when the operation fails. Undo and archiving give people room to change their minds. URL state makes a filtered view shareable, while infinite scrolling removes repetitive navigation. Referencing an existing page helps the agent reuse the app's interface and data fetching conventions. He then packages recurring design and deployment preferences into agent skills. The final step is a verification loop that opens the running application and exercises the feature from start to finish, because a successful build and passing tests can still leave a broken experience. These are practical lessons from an internal tool, without a claim of measured financial savings. Speaker info: - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thisismahmoud/ - https://github.com/m-abdelwahab Timestamps: 00:00 - Replacing Railway's internal marketing tools 2:32 - Structure and abstractions for consistent features 4:03 - Product polish agents need to be asked for 4:57 - Autosave and collaboration 6:16 - Optimistic updates, undo and archiving 8:45 - URL state and navigation 9:38 - Reference pages and agent skills 11:47 - Verify the running feature from start to finish