Kai Long

Getting a working app out of a few prompts is the easy part now. What I keep running into is the day after: the app works, but I don't really know what's inside it.

A few things that bit me after the "wow, it runs" moment:

• Realizing I couldn't explain how auth or data storage was actually set up

• Fixing one bug and breaking something unrelated because I never saw the structure

• Coming back a week later and not recognizing my own project

So I've started doing a short "day 2 pass" before I build anything new on top: skim the structure, check where secrets and user data live, and write a few lines about what the app does and how.

AI can get me to a working app in a day, but "it works on my machine" and "it's safe for real users" are very different things.

The part that worries me is the boring stuff that's easy to miss when the code looks clean and everything runs: API keys sitting in the frontend, auth checks that exist on the page but not on the endpoint, database rules left wide open from the prototype stage, no rate limits on anything. The AI rarely warns you about these unless you ask, and by the time you think to ask, you've already moved on to the next feature.

Right now my pre-launch process is mostly manual and a bit random: I skim through the auth flow, search the repo for hardcoded secrets, and try to break things as a logged-out user. It catches some things, but I never feel fully confident.

I'd love to hear how others handle it:

Building used to be the bottleneck. Now I can get a working app faster than I can write a good landing page copy for it. So the "idea guy with no code skills" excuse is basically gone.

But almost none of my vibe-coded weekend projects have real users, and I don't think that's a coding problem anymore.

For those of you actually getting traction - what's eating your time now that building isn't the bottleneck?