Workshop #010 · Intermediate lids down — watch it go live

Taking the Wagon
to Marketnobody buys from your barn

Everything you have built in nine sessions can be seen by exactly one person. Today that stops being true, and it takes about forty seconds.

By the end of today you will have something of your own at a real address on the internet, and you will know how to take it back down again in two seconds.

Presented by Emile du Toit
brainitconsulting.com

Where we got to

Here is an overview of the last two sessions in five lines.

You wrote a map — what the thing must do, before anybody builds it.
You know what a well is, and when a folder of files is still the right answer.
Rows and columns, one fact in one place, and a column you never kept is a question you cannot ask.
You have a free Vercel account from last session's homework, which is most of today already done.
And all of it is still on one laptop, visible to one person.

Today we fix the last part.

Nobody buys from your barnThe gap between working and reachable.
What “on the internet” actually isThere is no cloud. There is a computer.
Paddock, training ring, open roadThree places, one public.
Putting it out, and taking it backForty seconds out. Two seconds back.
What changes once it is publicFour things, and one of them matters most.

Then the questions this always raises, the glossary so far, and the picture to photograph.

Nobody buys from your barn

Everything you have built so far can be seen by exactly one person.

Nine sessions in, you have a folder, an assistant that works in it, house rules, an undo, a map and a well. And every single bit of it lives on one laptop, in one house, and is visible to one person, who is you.

That is not a criticism. It is the normal shape of things at this point, and it is where a great many people quietly stop — not because the building got hard, but because the last step never got taken and the thing slowly stopped mattering.

The gap is smaller than it looks. It is one command, or one button, and about forty seconds.

What actually changes

Before. Dale's list works when Dale's daughter has her laptop open, is sitting at the office desk, and has remembered to run it.

After. Dale opens the same short web address on his phone, in the truck, at ten past six, while every laptop in the business is shut and in a bag.

Same list. Same three names. The only difference is where the copy is running.

A thing nobody can reach is a hobby. That is fine, as long as you meant it.

What “on the internet” actually is

There is no cloud. There is somebody else's computer, and it is never off.

The word cloud has done a lot of damage, because it makes something quite ordinary sound like weather. Here is the whole arrangement, and there is nothing else hiding behind it.

Fig. 1 — There is no cloud. There is a computer that never gets switched off, a copy of your work on it, and a name pointing at the door.

A computer that never gets switched off. In a building somewhere, with better power and better internet than your office has, looked after by people whose only job that is.
A copy of your work on it. Not the original. Your folder stays exactly where it is; a copy goes up.
A name pointing at it, so that when somebody types the name, they arrive at your copy rather than somebody else's.

That is it. When people say a thing is “deployed”, they mean those three have happened. The word for doing it is deploy, and the machine belongs to a company — ours is Vercel, the same account you signed up for last session to get the well.

Two things worth being clear about now rather than later.

Your laptop is not involved once it is up. You can close it, sell it, or drop it. The copy keeps serving.
Nothing goes up that you did not send. Deploying does not scoop up your machine. It sends the one folder you pointed it at, and nothing else on the disk is in reach — the same line round the work from session three.

Not weather. A computer, in a building, that nobody ever turns off.

Paddock, training ring, open road

Three places your work can be, and only one of them has the public in it.

You would not take a green horse straight out onto the road. You work it in the paddock, then in a fenced ring where it can meet a few real things safely, and only then do you take it out where the traffic is. Publishing works the same way, and the middle step is the one nobody expects.

Fig. 2 — Paddock, training ring, open road. Two of the three are on the real internet, and only one of them has the public on it.

The paddock — your own machine. Fast, private, and nobody else can reach it at all. This is where you have been for nine sessions.
The training ring — a preview. Every time you send work up, it gets its own address on the real internet. Real ground: same machines, same speed, same everything. But there is a gate on it.
The open road — production. The short address. The one you print on a van. There is only ever one of these, and it is the only one the public can open.

The bit that surprises everybody

Those long preview addresses are not public. Send one to somebody outside your account and they get a login screen, not your page.

We measured it rather than trusting the documentation. The short address answered normally to anyone. Every long deployment address — including the one currently serving production — sent a stranger to a login page instead.

So the training ring really is fenced, and the fence is on by default. That is the right way round, and it means you can put something half-finished up without any risk of a customer finding it.

The habit that follows is simple and it is the whole safety story of this session: look at it in the ring before you take it on the road. Same work, same internet, on your phone, with nobody watching. Then promote it.

Real ground, with a fence round it. That is what a preview is.

Putting it out, and taking it back

Forty seconds out. Two seconds back.

Here is the demo, start to finish, and you have met every idea in it before in another form. One page of Dale's — the three jobs waiting on him — and four commands.

What you are about to see

1. The page, already live at a short address. I close the laptop lid and it stays up, because it was never running here.

2. I change the heading, obviously and badly, and send it up. It comes back with a preview address.

3. The preview shows the new wording. Production, in the other tab, has not moved. Two versions, both live, one public.

4. I promote it. Now production has the bad heading and every customer can see it.

5. I put yesterday's back. Watch the clock.

Fig. 3 — Session seven's undo, now pointed at the thing your customers are looking at.

The rollback is the part worth sitting with. Every version you have ever published is still there, whole, and going back to one is a choice rather than a repair. When it ran during testing it took two seconds.

That matters because of what people do otherwise. Something goes wrong on a live site at four on a Friday, and the instinct is to fix it — badly, in a hurry, while customers watch. The professional move is the opposite: put the old one back first, so nobody is watching any more, and then fix it properly on Monday.

The version you will actually use

Commands are fine for showing you what happens. What you will really do is connect the folder to your Vercel account once, and then it deploys itself.

Every marker you push — session seven — gets its own preview address, automatically, without you asking.
Whatever is on your main trail becomes production.
You stop thinking about deploying. Saving a marker and publishing become the same act, which is the point at which this stops being a chore.

That is why session seven came before this one. The markers were never only an undo — they are also the thing that decides what the public sees.

Do not fix a live site under pressure. Put yesterday's back, then fix it.

What changes once it is public

Not much. But the things that change, change completely.

The mechanics of publishing are easy, and you have just watched them. What is worth ten minutes is the short list of things that are different once a stranger can reach your work.

Show me every step — putting your first page on the internet

Genuinely about ten minutes, and free. If you did last session's homework you already have the account, which was most of it.

What you need first

A free Vercel account — from session nine. If you skipped it, that walkthrough is in #009 chapter five.
A folder with one file in it, called index.html. That name matters: it is the one a web address opens by default.
Something in that file. Ask the assistant: “make me an index.html with my business name, what we do in one line, and a phone number.” Twenty seconds, and it is yours.

The easy way — drag and drop

Go to your Vercel dashboard and look for Add New, then Project.
There is a deploy-by-dragging option. Drag your folder onto it.
Wait about forty seconds. You get an address ending in .vercel.app.
Open it on your phone. This is the moment. Do it on your phone, not your laptop — it lands differently.

The way you will end up using

Put the folder on GitHub — session seven, the same markers and the same push.
On Vercel, Add New → Project → Import, and pick that repository.
Deploy. From now on every push publishes itself: a preview for every marker, production for your main trail.
Never deploy by hand again. That is the actual prize here.

Three things not to do

Do not put a password or a key in the page. Anything in a web page can be read by anyone who visits it — there is no such thing as a hidden line in a public file. Secrets go in environment variables, which live on the machine that serves the page and never travel to the browser.

Do not let the customer's browser talk to your well. The connection string from last session belongs on the server, never in the page. If you take one rule from today, take this one.

Do not buy a domain on day one. The free address works perfectly and costs nothing. Buy the name when there is something at the other end of it worth naming — it is about fifteen dollars a year and it takes ten minutes whenever you are ready.

And if you get stuck: stop after ten minutes and bring it to the next session, or send me a message. This is the step where people give up quietly, and it is the one that takes the least time to unstick.

Four things that are true from now on

Anything in the page can be read. Not most of it — all of it. Right-click, view source, and there it is. So no keys, no passwords, no supplier prices you would not put in the window.
The well is reached by the wagon, not by the customer. The page a customer loads never talks to your database directly. It asks the machine that serves the page, and that machine holds the key. This is the single most common expensive mistake, and now you will not make it.
It costs nothing until it is working. Free tiers are generous, and no card is asked for. When you do outgrow them, the bill arrives because the thing is being used, which is the good problem.
The name is separate from the thing. A domain is rented by the year and pointed at whatever you like. You can point it somewhere else next spring without rebuilding anything.

Before the next session

Make a folder with one index.html in it. Your business name, one line about what you do, a phone number. Ask the assistant to write it.
Put it on the internet. The walkthrough above; either route is fine.
Open it on your phone. Do this bit properly. It is the moment the whole course turns into a thing rather than a course.
Send the short address to one person who will be nice about it.
Change one word and send it up again. Look at the preview address first, then promote it. Do the two-step once by hand so you know what the ring is for.
Then roll it back and watch how long that takes.

If any of that goes sideways

Everything is at github.com/brainit-consulting/ai-workshops — pick end-of-010 from the dropdown for the one-page site used in the demo, ready to deploy.

And if it is the account, or the deploy, or a screen that does not look like the picture: that is what I am here for. Ten minutes of somebody who has seen the screen before beats an evening on your own, every time.

Step three is the one that matters. Everything else on the list is practice for it.

Questions people actually ask

Six that come up every time this session is taught.

Is this a website, or an app?

One wagon, whatever you load on it.

Both, and the distinction matters less than people think. A page with your phone number on it and a thing that talks to a database go up exactly the same way, to the same address, with the same two commands. Start with the page.

Can people find it before I am ready?

The ring is fenced. The road is not.

Not by accident. Previews need a login. Production is public but nobody knows the address until you tell them, and it will not turn up in a search for a good while unless you ask it to. If you want to be certain, put a password on it — that is a setting, not a build.

What if I break the live one?

Turn the wagon round.

Roll it back. Two seconds, and every previous version is still sitting there. Then fix the real problem with nobody watching. That is the whole answer, and it is why this session comes after session seven rather than before it.

Do I need my own name — my own dot com?

The name over the stall can wait until there is a stall.

Not to start. The free address works exactly as well and costs nothing. Buy the name when you are ready to put it on a van — around fifteen dollars a year, ten minutes, and nothing gets rebuilt when you do it.

What does it cost when people actually use it?

Feed scales with the herd.

Nothing for a long while. A small business site sits inside the free tier comfortably. If you ever leave it, you will be leaving it because enough people are using the thing to make the bill irrelevant — and you can set a spending cap so there are no surprises.

Is my database now on the internet too?

The well was always in the yard. The gate is what you control.

It already was, from last session — that is what made it reachable from your phone. What matters is that the customer's browser never talks to it. The page asks the server, the server asks the well, and the key never leaves the server. Chapter five, second bullet, and it is the one to remember.

Plain words

Everything the series has named so far. Today's are marked.

This list grows every session and always shows the lot, so you never need last week's handout to read this week's.

Large language model (LLM) 001: The engine that predicts the next word. The horse.
GPT 001: Generative — it makes new text rather than looking up a stored answer. Pre-trained — all its learning happened in advance. Transformer — the design of the machinery underneath. A breed name, not a job title.
Knowledge cutoff 001: The date its training stopped. It knows nothing after it, and doesn't know that it doesn't. The last day the horse was out in the world.
Prompt 001: What you type. A pull on the reins.
Chatbot 001: A model you can talk to, turn by turn. Horse plus bridle.
System prompt / instructions 001: Standing orders sent with every message, whether you type them or not. The saddle.
Context window 001: How much of the conversation it can hold at once. How far it can see on this ride.
Token 001: A chunk of a word — how length is counted, and how you're billed. Sugar cubes.
Hallucination 001: Making something up and sounding certain. Shying at a shed snakeskin.
Tool 002: A specific action it's allowed to take in the real world. A saddlebag.
MCP 002: An agreed standard for plugging tools into a model. Standard-size buckles.
Agent 002: A model given a goal, tools, and permission to keep going. A working horse, not a show pony.
Agentic loop 002: Look, decide, act, check, repeat. The ride itself.
Human in the loop 002: A person approves before something real happens. A hand on the reins.
Automation 002: The same work happening without you starting it each time. The horse knows the route.
File 003: A thing with a name and contents. A single piece of gear.
Folder (directory) 003: A box holding files, and sometimes other folders. A shelf.
Project 003: One folder holding one job's worth of everything. The room, with the door shut.
Path 003: The written address of a file — which boxes it sits inside. Directions to the shelf.
Editor (VS Code) 004: A window showing you one folder and everything in it. The tack room.
Terminal 004: A panel where you type an instruction to the computer directly. Talking to the stable itself.
Install 004: Putting a program on your own machine, once. Building the room.
Permission prompt 005: The stop before it changes anything, showing what it plans to do. The gate, and your hand on the latch.
Approval mode 005: Whether it asks every time, works on its own, or only shows a plan. How loose you're holding the reins.
Interrupting 005: Stopping it mid-job with the escape key. A pull on the reins. Ordinary.
Project instructions 006: A plain-English file of standing rules that lives in the folder. The saddle, hanging in the room.
Run a command 006: Doing something on the computer rather than writing words about it. Actual work, not conversation.
Working on copies 006: Duplicating a file so the original can't be harmed. Schooling in the paddock, not on the road.
Version control 007: Keeping every previous version of everything, so any of them can come back. A trail you can ride back.
Git 007: The program that keeps the trail. It runs on your own machine. What drives the markers in.
Commit 007: One marker, with a short note saying what you had just done. A gate you can ride back through.
Repository (repo) 007: A folder that keeps its own history. The field, with the trail marked in it.
GitHub 007: A copy of the repository kept online — a real backup, and a way to hand it to somebody. The shared stable at the trailhead.
Push and pull 007: Sending your markers up to that copy, and fetching down anything that is there and not here. Riding to the trailhead and back.
Spec (brief) 008: One page describing a job well enough to hand it over. What it must do — not how to build it. The trail map. Where you are going, not which foot the horse leads with.
Scope 008: What is in this job, and what is deliberately not. Where the map stops. The country past the edge is not today's ride.
Acceptance 008: How you will know the thing is right when you see it. How you know you arrived.
Plan mode 008: A setting where it works out what it would do, and shows you, before touching anything. Reading the map aloud before anyone mounts up.
Assumption 008: Something you took to be true and never checked. A stretch of map you drew from memory rather than from riding it.
Database 009: One place the information lives, built to be read and written by several things at once without ever disagreeing with itself. The well.
Table 009: A list of one kind of thing, with the same facts recorded about each one. One list on the slate: every job, every time.
Row 009: One of the things. One job, one customer, one invoice. A single line on the slate.
Column 009: One fact, kept about every row. Customer. Status. Date received. The same question asked of every line.
Query (SQL) 009: A written question put to the database. SQL is the language they are written in. Lowering the bucket, and what you asked it to bring up.
Connection string 009: One line of text that says where the well is and unlocks it. Treat it as a key, because it is one. The key to the pump house.
Postgres (Neon) 009: The most widely used serious database; Neon is a company that runs one for you. A well somebody else dug, and maintains.
Deploy 010: Sending a copy of your work to a machine that is always on, so other people can reach it. Loading the wagon and driving it to market.
Production 010: The version the public sees. There is only ever one. The open road.
Preview 010: The same work, live on the internet, at an address only your people can open. The training ring — real ground, fence round it.
Rollback 010: Putting the previous version back as the public one. Seconds, not a repair job. Turning the wagon round.
Domain 010: The name people type. Yours, rented by the year, pointed at your work. The name over the stall.
Environment variable 010: A secret kept on the machine that serves the page, never inside the page itself. The key stays in the driver's pocket.

★

Everything on one page

If you photograph one thing today, photograph this.

1 · Nobody buys from your barn

It works. One person can see it. That is not the same thing.

2 · Paddock, ring, road

Two are on the real internet. One has the public on it.

3 · Two seconds back

Every version is still there. Going back is a choice.

Next session

4 · Riding the fences

The dull weekly round that stops the disasters.

The habit worth keeping: look at it in the ring before you take it on the road, and when something goes wrong on the road, put yesterday's back before you try to fix anything. Both take seconds. Both are the difference between a bad ten minutes and a bad Friday.

Next session

#011 — Riding the Fences

You now have something on the internet that people can reach, which means for the first time it can break where you cannot see it. Next time is the dull, unglamorous round that stops that mattering: how to check work you cannot read, what to check after every change, and how to have the machine do the checking so it actually happens on a Tuesday in November rather than only in the week you were enthusiastic.

Before you come: have your page live, and write down the one thing about it that would embarrass you most if it quietly stopped working.

Want someone to hold the reins with you?

I do this for a living, and love to help people.

Thirty-plus years in enterprise software and a computer science degree — which mostly means I have watched a great many horses bolt, and I can usually tell you which ones are worth saddling before you spend money on the saddle.

In person

Your team, your room, your actual work on the whiteboard instead of somebody else's examples.

Over video

The same session, at your desks, with fewer chairs to stack afterwards.

Built for real

When the idea survives the workshop and somebody has to go and build the thing — that part I do too.

Fun fact — I rode to school on horseback as a kid in South Africa. So the metaphor isn't borrowed. I've done the falling off in person.

Emile du Toit brainitconsulting.com

Workshop #010 · Taking the Wagon to Market
© 2026 Emile du Toit, BrainIT Consulting
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Taking the Wagonto Marketnobody buys from your barn

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