Prototyping has done wonders for speeding up software delivery. I start with a clone of our UI repository and open Claude Code. I'll prompt it to help me add a button (or whatever), set up some test data, and record a demo of a full workflow. It looks great in a Loom video! But it's far from production-ready. We still need:
- Backend support
- Regression testing
- Functional testing
- Security testing
- Performance testing
- Scalability considerations
- Edge case considerations
- Architectural considerations
- Accessibility requirements
- Design system considerations
- Maintainability considerations
- User permissions considerations
That's just off the top of my head! What about:
Lots more stuff #
- Logging, metrics, and tracing
- Monitoring and alerting (how do you find out it broke before users do?)
- Error handling and graceful degradation
- CI/CD pipeline, deployment, and rollback strategy
- Feature flags
- Infrastructure provisioning, config management, and secrets handling
- Rate limiting and abuse prevention
- Retry logic and idempotency
- Concurrency and race conditions
- Backups and disaster recovery
- Database schema design and migrations
- Data validation and integrity constraints
- Caching strategy and invalidation
- PII handling, data retention, and deletion
- Authentication
- Authorization, roles, and permissions
- Session management
- Multi-tenancy and data isolation
- Regulatory compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, etc.)
- Audit trails
- Dependency licensing
- Data residency requirements
- Localization and translation
- Timezone, currency, and date/number formatting
- Right-to-left support
- Empty, , and error states
- Offline and slow-network behavior
- Responsive layout, mobile, and cross-browser quirks
- Analytics and instrumentation
- A/B testing hooks
- Cloud cost / budget impact at scale
- Code review
- Unit, integration, and end-to-end tests (and coverage)
- Technical and user-facing documentation
- Runbooks, on-call, and support
- Versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation paths
- I used Claude to generate the rest of this list
My prototypes have eased the communication from idea to delivery better than any other tool, but it's still far from a production-ready product. I enjoy making them, and engineering enjoys referencing them, but anybody that thinks their vibe-coded prototype is ready for production is fooling themselves.
A recent piece discussed how AI is not behind mass layoffs, and may likely never be. After working with a team rocketing forward with AI adoption in a space that needs protection from AI more than ever, I couldn't agree more.
Indeed, it seems we're starting to hire more engineers even after the noticeable boost in quality in AI generated code in November's inflection point. Software is an industry intent on automating as much as possible. It usually automates the boring stuff, which lets us focus on the fun stuff. And the fun stuff is solving real problems, not typing code.