I've been building Next.js + AI SaaS apps for a while. The interesting part of every app — the thing the marketing copy sells — is the AI. The boring part is everything else: auth, billing, webhooks, tests, i18n, the database schema you'll hate yourself for in six months.

I used to spend two weekends on the boring part and then run out of energy before the AI part shipped.

After enough rebuilds, I started noticing the same five decisions kept coming up, and the same five answers kept winning. None of them are clever. None of them will get me retweeted. But they're what let me ship a real AI SaaS in a weekend instead of two months.

1. Drizzle over Prisma (for SaaS specifically)

Prisma's DX feels great for the first two weeks.…