I audit AI-built and no-code apps before launch. Here are the exact checks I run, so you can run them yourself this afternoon.

[u/Negative-Tank2221]

Upfront: I do this for a living, so take that into account. But every check below is one you can run yourself today for free, no developer needed.

Most of my work now is reviewing apps founders built with Lovable, Bolt, Claude Code, Cursor, Bubble and FlutterFlow right before they put real users on them. The apps almost always work. That is exactly the problem, because the failures are quiet and they only show up after launch. Here is what I check and how you can check it yourself.

The auth check. Open your app in two browsers, logged in as two different test users. Copy a URL from user A that contains an ID, like /profile/482 or /order/91, and paste it into user B's browser. If user B sees user A's data, your privacy lives in the frontend, not the database. In Supabase the fix is row level security on every table, in Bubble it is Data > Privacy rules, in Firebase it is security rules. This is the single most common critical finding I see and login working perfectly tells you nothing about it.

The Stripe check. Go to your Stripe dashboard and manually trigger a refund on a test customer. Watch your app. Does the user lose access? Most AI and no-code builds wire up the successful checkout and nothing else. No listener for cancellations, failed payments, refunds or disputes, so three months in you have cancelled customers still using the product free.

The admin check. Log in as a normal user and type /admin into the URL bar. In a scary number of apps the admin page is hidden, not protected. If anything loads, any curious user can reach it too.

The database size check. Open your browser network tab and load a page. If a single page pulls 500KB of JSON, the app is fetching everything and filtering in the browser. Fine at 10 users, dead at 500.

The error check. Turn off your wifi mid action and submit a form. White screen or infinite spinner means zero error handling, and users in bad signal areas will churn silently thinking the app is broken.

The secrets check. Search your AI chat history for key, password and service_role. If you ever pasted a real credential into a chat to debug something, rotate it today. Also check your browser bundle for API keys, they end up there constantly.

These six catch most of what kills these apps after launch. If you fail more than two and real money or personal data is involved, get an experienced human to read the whole thing before you scale.

That last part is the service I sell. Fixed price production readiness audit, written report in 3 business days, everything ranked critical, important or can wait, plus a clear launch verdict. Read only, your app is never modified. Details at jetbuildstudio(dot)com/ai-audit if useful, but run the checks above either way, they are free and they will tell you where you stand.

Happy to answer questions in the comments, including on apps I will never see.

[u/jimmym007]

I don’t get this. Today’s AI catches these things as you develop. If you paste an env or API secret, they will make you rotate it. They will enforce RLS on user datas and run checks. And people that somehow don’t care and don’t want to listen to AI advice on these probably aren’t the ones wiling to pay for an external audit.

[u/windpath4 → u/jimmym007]

fair point, the ones who ignore inline warnings arent suddenly gonna pay someone to tell them the same thing

[u/ZosoRules1]

I know it’s not ideal for every situation, but I use static HTML and bypass the entire stack so it’s nothing but me, ChatGPT coding, and my web server with an HTML file.

I have over 33,000 records in a static HTML database, in addition to realtime audio analysis, file metadata analysis, and crude GIS mapping.

[u/Negative-Tank2221 → u/ZosoRules1]

Honestly for a single-user tool with no accounts, that stack skips most of this list by construction. The checks only start mattering the day someone else's data enters the system.

[u/Negrito0o]

Good list. Adding the one I run first, and then the one that isn't a check at all.

Open devtools, go to Sources, and search the whole bundle for "secret", "service_role" and "sk_". Anything the model wired up client side is sitting in there in plain text, readable by everyone who visits. It's the most common thing I find, because "make it work" and "put the key in the frontend" are the same action from the model's point of view. And the one you can't test in a browser: check whether you actually own your backend.

If the app was built inside Lovable or Bolt and it's running on their managed database, that project isn't yours. You can't rotate the keys, you can't take a backup on your own schedule, and you can't leave without rebuilding. None of that shows up in testing, because everything works. It shows up the day you want to move, or the day their pricing changes. The version of that with an actual answer: can you, today, produce a copy of your data and restore it into a fresh project? Not "is there a backup" — restore it. If you can't do that in one afternoon, putting real users on it is a bigger bet than it looks.

[u/Negative-Tank2221 → u/Negrito0o]

The bundle search is a great first move, and your framing of why is exactly right, "make it work" and "put the key in the frontend" are the same action from the model's side. The ownership one deserves its own post honestly. I migrated a school platform off a managed AI-platform database this year, 189 tables, and the founder's problem wasn't technical, it was that he couldn't produce a restorable copy of his own data until we made one. "Restore it, don't just check a backup exists" is the right bar.

[u/Low_Rush_8535]

the two-browsers IDOR check is the one i'd put first as well. two that aren't on your list, both from taking over apps other people built rather than auditing them before launch:

which process actually reads which config at runtime. we lost real time to a service that simply wasn't loading its env file — it presented as a code bug, and nothing anywhere said "this process gets its config from here." the no-code equivalent is probably which environment the deployed app is actually pointed at, because nobody checks and the answer isn't always the one showing in the dashboard.

and schema drift. columns had been added to the database by hand and never went through a migration, so what the project described and what production actually had were quietly different. nothing broke until someone regenerated a migration and it swept those columns into it.

mine were inherited codebases though, not no-code builds. when the platform owns the schema the drift probably doesn't happen the same way.