The setup I was building an AI article generator. Four phases: Research — pull live SERP data, extract entities, score competitors Brief — Claude Sonnet writes a structured brief from the SERP Draft — section-by-section drafting in a fixed persona voice Polish — adversarial review pass that flags AI tells End-to-end: 6–8 minutes. Each phase: 60–180 seconds. Multiple LLM calls per phase. Token st
Every AI app I've shipped recently rewrote the same plumbing. The OAuth dance for Slack. Encrypted storage for an API key. Refresh-token logic that finally fails on the 3rd call after an hour. Wiring up an MCP client to a server behind a bearer token someone pasted into a Notion page.