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 →