Vibe-coded apps fail in patterns. The user interface looks finished, but the production surface is usually a mix of generated assumptions, skipped edge cases, and code nobody has had time to interrogate.
That does not make the product bad. It means the next phase needs a different kind of attention.
Start with the dangerous flows
Before launch, review the flows where a mistake would hurt users or the business:
- Signup, login, password reset, and admin access
- Payment, subscription, invoice, and refund paths
- Webhooks that change customer state
- Database writes involving private or financial data
- File uploads, third-party API calls, and background jobs
If the app was built with Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, Claude Code, or ChatGPT, assume those paths need human review even if they appear to work.
Security comes before cleanup
Pretty code can still leak data. A good vibe code audit checks:
- Whether users can access another user's records
- Whether server-only secrets are exposed to the browser
- Whether API routes enforce authorization on every request
- Whether database policies match the product's privacy model
- Whether generated SQL or filters can be abused
- Whether webhooks verify signatures before changing state
The goal is not theoretical perfection. The goal is knowing what would be exploitable once real users arrive.
Production readiness is more than deployment
Deploying to Vercel, Fly, Render, AWS, or Supabase does not make the system production-ready by itself. Production readiness means the app has a repeatable deploy path, a rollback plan, useful logs, clear ownership of environment variables, and enough monitoring to notice when the important parts break.
If nobody can answer "what happens when this webhook fails?" the system is not ready yet.
Test the promises the product makes
Generated code often has zero meaningful test coverage. Start with tests for the flows that define trust:
- A user can sign up and only see their own data
- A paid customer gets the right access
- A failed payment does not grant access
- A deleted account cannot keep calling protected APIs
- A webhook can be retried safely
Those tests do not need to cover everything. They need to protect the promises that would be expensive to break.
The output should be prioritized
A useful audit does not end with a huge list of complaints. It should separate:
- Launch blockers
- High-priority fixes
- Medium-priority hardening
- Cleanup that can wait
- Rebuild decisions that need more evidence
That prioritization is the difference between a code review and a production plan.
When to bring in help
Bring in an outside review when the app handles user data, payments, enterprise customers, or investor diligence. Bring one in earlier if every AI-assisted fix creates two new errors.
Vibe coding is excellent at getting to a working product. A production audit answers the next question: what has to be true before strangers can trust it?