From empty repo to TestFlight

Two working days after the first commit, I told Claude to get it on my phone. Apple made that... educational:

• Cloud signing rejected the App Store Connect API key with a cryptic "No Account for Team." The workaround was fully manual signing — certificate and provisioning profile created through Apple's REST API, archive and upload scripted with xcodebuild. No Xcode GUI, no interactive logins anywhere.
• The first build uploaded successfully and then didn't show up for testing. The reason: the tester group had zero testers in it. One API call fixed what an hour of staring couldn't.
• The newest Xcode broke a dependency with a Swift compiler error; a one-line patch, applied automatically on every install, un-broke it.

What came out the other side is a fully scripted release pipeline: bump the build number, archive, upload, wait ten minutes, it's on my phone. Seven builds went through it in the first week — which is why every piece of feedback in the next few posts turned into a new build the same evening.