Productionise without falling over
The gap between it works on my machine and real people depend on it is its own phase, and skipping it is how promising apps quietly fall over. This is not a small risk with vibe-coded software. Security researchers analysing AI-generated code have repeatedly found that a large share of it ships with vulnerabilities, and Veracode's 2025 testing across many models found roughly 45% of AI-written samples failed security checks, with models choosing an insecure approach nearly half the time when a secure one was equally available. The AI is optimising for working, not for safe. That is your job. A few non-negotiables get you across the gap.
Put it in version control from early. Connect your repository, learn the basics of branches and pull requests, and you get a safety net, a history, and the ability to work in parallel without fear. It is the foundation everything else sits on, and learning the small amount of git you need is well worth the afternoon.
Deploy somewhere real, and take the free help on the way. The major cloud providers offer startup credits and funding programmes that can carry your infrastructure costs for a good while, so apply for them, just not in the frantic hours right around a launch.
Take security seriously, because autonomous agents introduce real risk on top of the code itself. An agent acting on your machine or your accounts can be steered by malicious input into doing something you never intended, so be deliberate about what you let an agent do and what permissions you hand it. Never paste a live secret into a chat, keep credentials out of the code the AI can see, and validate any externally supplied input before you trust it. The convenience is real and so is the exposure.
Build logging that will survive scale. Raw scattered print statements are fine for ten users and useless at ten thousand, so capture your logs and errors in a way you can actually search and act on when something breaks under real load, with deeper debug views kept off limits in production.
And build the boring pieces that used to cost money, now that each is roughly one prompt: a help centre instead of a paid support tool, a changelog that doubles as ongoing marketing, your newsletter and landing pages, the demo video setup. These are no longer line items. They are an afternoon each, and they make the product feel finished.