Vibe-coding rescue
Stuck on a vibe-coded app? We'll finish it and get it live.
If you built an app with Lovable, Cursor, Bolt or Replit and it works 80% of the way — then broke at login, payments, deployment, or the code got too big to reason about — AI Cubed takes it from where you are to a production app you own. Audit in two business days. Most rescues take two to four weeks.
AI Cubed
September 9, 2026
This is the most common way people find us now: not with a blank-page idea, but with a half-built product, a burnt credit balance, and a very specific error they've been staring at for a week. That is a good place to start from. The AI did real work. Our job is to make it survive contact with real users.
fixed-price audit turnaround
most rescues, audit to live
yours — repo, accounts, docs
Sounds familiar?
- "Login works on my machine and nowhere else."
- "Stripe test mode works. Live mode doesn't, and I can't tell why."
- "The AI keeps rewriting files I didn't ask it to touch, and now something else is broken."
- "I've spent hundreds of dollars on credits and it's further from done than it was last week."
- "It works with three test records. With real data it takes eight seconds to load a page."
- "I don't actually know if my users' data is safe, and I'm scared to find out."
Every one of those is a sentence we've heard on a first call. None of them means the project is dead. They mean the app has reached the part of the work that AI coding tools are worst at — the unglamorous, cross-cutting plumbing that makes software safe to give to strangers.
What usually breaks in vibe-coded apps — and what we do about it
The same dozen things break in almost every AI-generated codebase we see, regardless of which tool built it. That is not a criticism of the tools; it is a description of where the last 20% actually lives.
| What breaks | Why it happens | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| Auth and sessions | Works in the tool's preview because the preview is the same origin. Falls over on a real domain, on mobile, or after a refresh. | Move to a proper session strategy (cookies or a maintained auth SDK), set redirect URLs and CORS for every environment, test logout, refresh and password reset end to end. |
| Environment variables and secrets | Keys pasted into source, or a single .env that means different things in dev and prod. | Separate dev / preview / prod configs, rotate anything that was ever committed, move server-only secrets out of the client bundle. |
| Database access control (Supabase RLS, Firestore rules) | The AI enabled the table but not the policies — or wrote policies that allow everything so the demo would work. | Write and test row-level policies per table; prove a logged-in user cannot read another user's rows. |
| API keys exposed client-side | OpenAI, Stripe or Resend keys called directly from the browser because it was the fastest way to make the feature work. | Move third-party calls behind server functions or edge functions; the browser never holds a paid key. |
| Schema drift | Migrations were run by hand in a dashboard, so the schema in the repo and the schema in production disagree. | Reconcile, capture the real schema as versioned migrations, add a migration step to deploy. |
| No error handling | Every request assumes the happy path. One bad input takes the page down with a white screen. | Error boundaries, input validation at the edge, sensible empty and failure states, logging you can read. |
| No tests | The tool 'tested' by clicking around once. Every later change is a coin flip. | A small, honest test suite around the flows that make money: sign-up, checkout, the core action. |
| Deploy configuration | It only runs inside the tool's hosting. Custom domain, environment separation and rollbacks don't exist. | Deploy to a host you control (Vercel, Cloudflare, Fly, a VPS), CI on the repo, preview environments, one-command rollback. |
| Performance on real data | Fine with ten rows; N+1 queries and unindexed columns appear at a thousand. | Indexes, pagination, query review, caching where it is actually needed. |
| Mobile layout | Built and previewed on a laptop. Half the users arrive on a phone. | Responsive pass on every screen that matters; real-device checks, not just a resized browser. |
| Agent edits you didn't ask for | Agent mode rewrote shared files while fixing something else. Nobody noticed until a different feature broke. | Lock the codebase behind a branch-and-review flow; diff every AI change before it lands. |
| Payments in live mode | Webhook secrets, live keys and success/cancel URLs were never configured outside test mode. | Configure live mode properly, verify webhooks, reconcile a real transaction end to end before launch. |
How we work
- Audit — two business days, fixed price. You give us read access to the repo and the app. We come back with a written report: what is broken, what is a security risk, what is missing for launch, and an honest fix-or-rebuild call with a fixed quote for the work.
- Stabilise — first week. Secrets rotated, access control fixed, the worst failures caught. The app stops getting worse and you stop being scared of it.
- Complete — weeks two to four for most apps. The missing 20% gets built properly: auth, payments, deploy pipeline, tests around the money paths, the features that never quite worked.
- Hand over — you own the repo, the hosting account, the domain, the documentation and a short runbook. If you want us to keep running and improving it, that is a separate, optional retainer. If not, you are not dependent on us.
The people who audit your app are the people who fix it. There is no hand-off to a junior team after the sales call, because there is no sales team.
Fix or rebuild? The honest decision
Most vibe-coded apps should be fixed, not rebuilt. The AI did real work and throwing it away is expensive. But some should be rebuilt, and telling you that on day two is cheaper for you than discovering it in week six. This is the test we apply in the audit.
| Signal | Points to fix | Points to rebuild |
|---|---|---|
| Core user flow | Works end to end in at least one environment | Never worked end to end anywhere |
| Data model | Tables match the product; a few missing constraints | Schema has been reshaped three times and nothing agrees |
| Framework and stack | Mainstream (Next.js, React + Supabase, etc.) with current versions | Obscure or abandoned, or three frameworks glued together |
| Security | Fixable gaps: missing RLS, keys in client | Architecture leaks data by design (e.g. everything runs client-side) |
| Size and coherence | Under ~30k lines, consistent patterns | Large, duplicated, contradictory patterns per file |
| Your budget and timeline | Weeks | Months, or the product direction has changed |
Rule of thumb: if the app has ever worked for one real user doing the real thing, fix it. If it has only ever worked in a demo, we look harder. Either way, the audit report says which and why, in writing.
How long it takes
- Audit: two business days from repo access.
- Stabilisation: usually inside the first week.
- Most rescues: two to four weeks from audit to live on your own domain.
- Larger apps or partial rebuilds: four to eight weeks, quoted after the audit.
We give a date at the end of the audit and we hit it. If scope grows, we tell you before it changes the date, not after.
How pricing works
The audit is a fixed price, paid once, and you get the report whether or not you continue. The rescue itself is quoted as a fixed scope after the audit — not an hourly meter — so the number you agree to is the number you pay. Rebuilds are quoted separately with a phased plan so the first working version arrives early. Book a call and we will walk through what your app is likely to need before you spend anything.
What we need from you for the audit
- Which tool built it (Lovable, Cursor, Bolt, Replit, v0, other) and a rough history.
- Read access to the repository, or a zip of the code.
- A link to the running app and a test account, if there is one.
- One paragraph on what it is supposed to do and what is actually broken.
- Your launch deadline, if you have one, and who the users are.
Who this is not for
If you want someone to keep vibe coding alongside you for $20 an hour, that is not us. If the app is a weekend experiment with no users planned, you probably do not need a rescue — you need a good tutorial, and we will say so. We are the right call when there are real users, real money or real data at stake and the app has to work on Monday.
Why AI Cubed for this
AI Cubed is a US AI implementation consultancy with an in-house engineering team. We build and run production systems for operations-heavy businesses, and we use the same AI coding tools our clients do — this website started as a Lovable project and now ships as a server-rendered build on Cloudflare with generated sitemaps, structured data and a full test of what crawlers see. We know exactly where these tools stop and the engineering starts, because we live on that line every week.
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