Guide
Is your vibe-coded app production-ready?
A practical checklist for founders who shipped with Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Replit Agent — before real users, and real risk, show up.
"Vibe coding" — building an app by describing what you want to an AI tool like Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Replit Agent, and shipping whatever comes out — has made it possible to go from idea to working prototype in a weekend. It has not made that prototype safe to put in front of real users. AI coding tools are optimized to produce code that looks correct and runs without errors, not code that resists someone actively trying to break it, or that survives more than a few hundred concurrent users. The gap between "it works on my machine" and "it's production-ready" is exactly where most vibe-coded apps get into trouble.
What "vibe coding" actually ships
Ask an AI coding assistant for a login flow and it will give you one that logs in. It usually will not rate-limit login attempts, hash passwords with a modern algorithm and proper salting, invalidate old sessions, or check that a user is authorized to see the specific record they're requesting rather than just any record. Ask for an API route and you'll get one that returns data, often without checking who's asking, whether they're allowed to ask, or what happens when a thousand of them ask at once. None of this shows up in a demo. It shows up the first time someone runs a script against your API, or the day a blog post sends you a traffic spike.
The three failure modes
Almost every vibe-coded app that gets into trouble fails in one of three ways. Security: authorization checks that look present but don't actually verify ownership, secrets committed to the repo or shipped to the client bundle, permissive CORS, and no rate limiting. Scale: database queries with no indexes, no caching, and no connection pooling, that work fine with ten rows and fall over at ten thousand. Maintainability: no tests, no error monitoring, and no clear separation between components, so every new AI-generated feature has a real chance of quietly breaking an old one. Any one of these is survivable. Discovering all three at once, in production, during a launch, is not.
A 10-point self-check
You can catch a meaningful share of this yourself, before an audit. Go through your app and answer honestly:
- 1.Do your API routes verify that the logged-in user owns the record they're requesting, not just that a token is present?
- 2.Are API keys and database credentials in environment variables, not hardcoded or committed to the repository?
- 3.Would git log of your repo turn up a secret that was committed and later "removed"? Removing it from the latest commit doesn't remove it from history.
- 4.Is there rate limiting on your login, signup, and any endpoint that sends email or costs you money per call, such as AI APIs or SMS?
- 5.Do your database queries use indexes on the columns you filter and sort by, or would they slow down linearly as rows grow?
- 6.If your server restarts or a request fails halfway through, is there any monitoring that tells you, or would you find out from a user complaint?
- 7.Is there a tested backup of your database, or would data loss be permanent?
- 8.Does your CORS configuration allow requests from any origin, or only the domains that should be calling your API?
- 9.Is user input validated and sanitized before it reaches your database or gets rendered back to other users, or does it flow straight from the request body?
- 10.Do your error responses leak stack traces, internal file paths, or raw database errors to the client, or are they sanitized before reaching the user?
What a production-readiness audit covers
If several of those didn't get a confident "yes," that's the normal state for an app that was built to prove an idea, not to survive one succeeding. A production-readiness audit is a structured pass over exactly this surface: authentication and authorization, secrets and configuration, database and infrastructure scaling, and code quality, delivered as a prioritized fix list, not a report you have to translate into action yourself.
AI Production Readiness Audit
Starts at €2,500~1 to 2 weeks
- Security, auth, and scalability review
- Prioritized fix list, not just a report
- Optional hands-on fixes after the audit
FAQ
What is "vibe coding"?
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want in natural language to an AI coding tool, such as Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit Agent, or a chat-based assistant like ChatGPT or Claude, and iterating on what it generates rather than writing the implementation by hand. It's a legitimate and fast way to get from idea to working prototype; it is not, by itself, a guarantee that the result is secure or able to handle real traffic.
Is code written by AI tools inherently insecure?
Not inherently. AI-generated code is often correct for the case it was asked about. The risk is what it wasn't asked about: authorization edge cases, rate limiting, secrets management, and scaling, which rarely come up in a prompt like "add a login page" and have to be checked for deliberately.
How long does a production-readiness audit take?
Typically one to two weeks, depending on the size of the codebase, delivered as a prioritized list of findings rather than a lengthy report.
What if my app isn't live yet?
That's the ideal time for an audit. Fixing an authorization gap or an unindexed query before launch is a code change; fixing the same issue after a data leak or an outage is an incident.
Do you fix the issues, or just report them?
Both are available. The audit itself is a prioritized fix list; hands-on fixes afterward are optional, not bundled in by default.
Not sure where you stand?
Answer a few quick questions and we'll reply honestly with what needs attention before you scale, no obligation.