Your AI-Built App Works. Here Is What Production Finds Anyway.

I build with AI tools every day and I run software they helped write in production, with real users and real money moving through it. The tools are good. The demo genuinely works, the happy path is solid, and most of what they generate is code I would have written myself on a normal day.

Production does not test the happy path. It tests the layer the builders skip, and it teaches the same handful of lessons so reliably that I turned them into a checklist. If you shipped something with Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, or a similar tool and people are actually using it, this is the layer worth an afternoon.

Nothing visibly breaking is the theme of this entire list, by the way. Every item here fails silently until the day it does not.

Check the site URL and the redirect allowlist in your auth provider against your live domain. The single most common finding I see is the preview domain, or localhost, still sitting in that list weeks after launch. The symptom is new users confirming their email and landing somewhere broken or stale, which looks like churn and is actually a two-minute settings fix.

If you take payments through Stripe, confirm your webhook endpoint verifies signatures. An endpoint that accepts any POST can be told a payment succeeded when it never did, and it will believe it. While you are in there, check the webhook URL points at production and the prices in your checkout match your pricing page, because those drift apart quietly as you iterate.

I published the full checklist I work from, free, no email gate, at groundcrew.pricepilot.cloud/checklist.html. I also turned it into a small service called Ground Crew: I run the audit on your live app, reproduce every finding by hand before I write it down, and deliver fixes as pull requests at a flat price if you want them. The audit itself is free while I am testing whether founders will pay for the upkeep afterward.

If you run the checklist on your own app and find something I missed, I genuinely want to hear about it. The list gets better every time production teaches somebody a new lesson.