A founder’s survival checklist for half-built AI apps.

Auth

Does sign-up, sign-in, role handling, and recovery work outside the happy path?

Billing

Would you trust entitlement changes, payment failures, and webhook weirdness under pressure?

Deploys

Can someone besides the original builder safely explain and ship the system?

Interpretation

If several of these feel shaky, you are probably not looking at a dramatic rewrite yet. You are looking at a missing diagnosis, missing guardrails, and missing confidence in the launch-critical path.