What "production-ready" means for an AI-built app, in 32 checks

Description and use

<p>AI app builders make the demo path work in hours. I see it every week: a founder opens a Lovable, Base44, Bolt or Replit app, signs up, clicks through the main flow, and it works. The hard question comes after that. In the words of the standard we published: "What decides whether an app can carry a business is everything the demo never tested: who can read which records, what happens when a payment webhook fails, whether a secret key shipped to the browser, and whether the owner can run the app without the builder."</p> <p>"Production-ready" gets used loosely, so we wrote it down. This post

Problem

<p>AI app builders make the demo path work in hours. I see it every week: a founder opens a Lovable, Base44, Bolt or Replit app, signs up, clicks through the main flow, and it works. The hard question comes after that. In the words of the standard we published: "What decides whether an app can carry a business is everything the demo never tested: who can read which records, what happens when a payment webhook fails, whether a secret key shipped to the browser, and whether the owner can run the app without the builder."</p> <p>"Production-ready" gets used loosely, so we wrote it down. This post

Outcome

<p>AI app builders make the demo path work in hours. I see it every week: a founder opens a Lovable, Base44, Bolt or Replit app, signs up, clicks through the main flow, and it works. The hard question comes after that. In the words of the standard we published: "What decides whether an app can carry a business is everything the demo never tested: who can read which records, what happens when a payment webhook fails, whether a secret key shipped to the browser, and whether the owner can run the app without the builder."</p> <p>"Production-ready" gets used loosely, so we wrote it down. This post

Evidence

What "production-ready" means for an AI-built app, in 32 checks

Source