Your AI built the app. Then production broke it.

What is vibe code rescue?

The pattern is always the same. The AI got you 80% of the way to something that demos beautifully. The remaining 20% is authentication that actually authenticates, a database that does not leak, payments that do not silently fail, and code a human can still change in six months. That last 20% is where AI tools stop and where most founders get stuck.

You are not doing it wrong. This is a structural limitation of how these tools work, and it is common enough that engineers have started describing it as a category of its own. One practitioner on Hacker News put it plainly: "My career is pivoting from writing software to cleaning up other people's vibe-coded software."

Signs your AI-built app needs a rescue

If you recognise three or more of these, the app is not close to launch, whatever the editor preview suggests.

A founder writing up their own failed build described the loop exactly: "I repeatedly tried to fix these issues through the chat interface, but even after multiple attempts, the core functionality remained broken."

What actually breaks in AI-generated code

This is not a rare failure. A 2025 CodeConductor survey found that 95% of developers spend extra time debugging and correcting AI-generated code, and Veracode's analysis found that 45% of AI-generated code introduces an OWASP Top 10 vulnerability. The problem is not that the AI wrote bad code; it is that it wrote code without the context that makes code safe.

These are the findings that come up again and again in AI-generated codebases. They are not exotic. They are the specific things a language model cannot reason about, because they depend on context outside the file it is writing.

Database rules that were never switched on

Supabase ships row-level security disabled by default, and AI builders frequently leave it that way. The practical effect is that any authenticated user can read every other user's rows. In April 2026 this was serious enough to get a CVE of its own — CVE-2025-48757 — covering Lovable projects with missing or misconfigured RLS policies. If your app stores anything belonging to one customer that another must not see, this is the first thing to check.

Keys shipped to the browser

Service-role keys, API secrets and admin tokens end up in client-side bundles because that is the shortest path to a working demo. Anyone who opens developer tools can read them. This one is usually a same-day fix and is the single most common critical finding.

Authentication that only looks like authentication

A login screen is not access control. AI-generated apps routinely check whether a user is signed in on the front end while leaving the API endpoints wide open to anyone who calls them directly.

Payments without webhooks

Stripe is integrated, checkout works in testing, and money appears to move. But without webhook handling the app never reliably learns whether a payment succeeded, so subscriptions silently fail to activate and refunds never propagate. Founders usually discover this from a customer complaint.

No tests, no CI, no way back

Zero test coverage and no deployment pipeline means every change is a gamble and there is no safe rollback. This is what makes the "fixing one thing breaks another" experience feel endless.

Prompt-loop decay and context limits

Past a certain codebase size the model can no longer hold the project in context. It starts re-solving problems it already solved, duplicating logic, and contradicting its own earlier decisions. More prompting makes it worse, not better, which is why credits run out with nothing to show.

How the rescue works

1. Send the repo or the tool link. Takes about two minutes. GitHub, a Lovable project link, a Bolt share URL — whatever you have.
2. 72-hour written audit. Every finding severity-ranked, in plain language, with what it would cost to leave it alone.
3. One fixed price. Not hourly. You approve a number before any work starts, and it does not move unless you change the scope.
4. Fix, harden, test, deploy. Security first, then stability, then the features you were stuck on.
5. Handover. Documentation, admin access, and a running-cost sheet so you know what hosting and APIs will actually cost you each month.
6. 30 days of support included. Not an upsell.

The audit is worth having even if you never hire Foundreco. Several founders have taken the report to their own developer, which is a completely acceptable outcome.

Rescue by tool

Each builder fails in its own way. Tell me which one you used and the audit starts from what is already known about that tool's typical output.

• Lovable — row-level security and Supabase policy gaps, exposed keys
• Bolt.new — deployment and environment configuration failures between editor and production
• Replit — apps that run in the workspace but will not survive independent hosting
• Cursor — large-codebase technical debt and duplicated, contradictory logic
• v0 — polished front ends with no real backend behind them
• Base44 — data-model and export problems when moving off the platform

Rescue or rebuild? How to decide

Not every app is worth saving, and an agency that tells you otherwise is selling hours. This is the framework Foundreco uses, and the audit gives you a straight answer against it.

If the honest answer is rebuild, you will be told that in the audit, and the audit fee comes off the rebuild.

What it costs

Rescue work at Foundreco starts at $1,500 and is quoted as one fixed price after the audit. There is no hourly billing and no discovery retainer.

For context, here is what the rest of the market publishes. Prices observed 16 August 2026.

The bottom of that range is a warning sign, not a bargain. At $5–$15 an hour you are buying more of the same problem from someone with no incentive to tell you the app should be rebuilt. Full numbers for every service are on the pricing page.

The six guarantees

These are written into the contract, not marketing copy.

1. Late means you pay 20% less. The deadline is mine to hit, not yours to absorb.
2. Fire me anytime. No lock-in, no notice period, no penalty.
3. A live project cockpit. You see progress without having to ask for an update.
4. A free launch kit with every build.
5. A running-cost truth sheet before launch, so hosting and API bills are never a surprise.
6. Thirty days of care after launch, included.

Work that looks like this

Foundreco publishes fifteen case studies with client-supplied numbers. Two are close relatives of a rescue — both cases where a platform or an existing build had run out of road:

• Havoc Motorcycles migrated off Shopify in three days and saved $30k, after the platform could not support the dealer portal and configurator they needed.
• MMA Plumbing replaced a €250,000 quote with a 46-module operating system, after every agency they approached priced the work out of reach.

To be straight with you: these are migrations and ground-up builds rather than AI-code rescues. Foundreco publishes what it has actually shipped, and a rescue case study will appear here when a client agrees to have theirs published.

Questions founders ask before messaging me