Vibe Coding Rescue Service: 5-Track Remediation

Your Lovable app is down. Your Cursor-generated auth is leaking session tokens. Your Supabase queries are timing out at 40 concurrent users. You have paying customers, an investor update due Friday, and a codebase nobody on your team fully understands because a language model wrote most of it.

This is a rescue, not a refactor. Different process, different urgency, different playbook.

Most agencies treat this like a normal consulting engagement: discovery call, scoping document, two-week statement of work, kickoff in three weeks. By then your churn curve has already bent. We publish the exact remediation playbook below because the failure modes in vibe coded apps are not mysterious. They are identical across the 50 apps we audited, and they fall into five tracks that can be fixed in parallel by engineers who have seen them before.

The 5-Track Rescue Playbook

Every rescue runs these five tracks concurrently. We staff one senior engineer per track for engagements above $25K, or one engineer rotating through all five for the $10K tier.

Track 1: Security

The highest-severity issues first, because security bugs keep shipping revenue while you sleep.

Hardcoded secrets in client bundles. Grep for sk_, sbp_, Bearer, and API key patterns. We find at least one in every engagement. Rotate, move to server-only env vars, add a pre-commit secret scanner.
Row-level security disabled or wide open. Lovable and Bolt generate Supabase tables with RLS off or with USING (true) policies. We rewrite policies per table with explicit auth.uid() = user_id scoping and add a CI check that fails the build if any table ships without RLS enabled.
CORS set to wildcard. Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * with credentials is a browser data-exfiltration vector. We lock it to your known origins and kill the * + credentials combination.
No rate limiting on auth endpoints. Credential-stuffing bots will find you within a week of launch. We add IP + account-based rate limits and lockout logic.

Track 2: Database

Missing indexes on foreign keys and filter columns. Prisma and Drizzle schemas generated by AI tools omit indexes by default. We profile the top 20 queries, add composite indexes, and typically cut p95 query time by 60-80%.
N+1 queries hiding behind ORM calls. The classic for (user of users) { await prisma.post.findMany(...) } pattern. We batch with in queries or rewrite as JOINs.
Connection pool exhaustion. Serverless functions opening a new Postgres connection per invocation, then hitting the pool cap at 50 concurrent users. We introduce a pooler (PgBouncer, Supavisor, or Prisma Accelerate) and set sane connection_limit defaults.
Schema migrations that lock tables. Adding a NOT NULL column to a 2M-row table takes the app offline. We rewrite migrations in the safe-migration pattern: add nullable, backfill in batches, add constraint.

Track 3: API + Error Handling

Unhandled promise rejections crashing Node processes. We wrap every route in structured try/catch and add a process-level unhandledRejection handler that logs and stays alive.
Stack traces returned to clients. res.status(500).json({ error: err }) leaks file paths, table names, and library versions. We install an error classifier that returns sanitized messages to clients and full context to logs.
No idempotency on write endpoints. Stripe webhook handlers and payment endpoints without idempotency keys double-charge customers on retries. We add idempotency tables keyed by request ID.

Track 4: Auth

OAuth refresh never implemented. Cursor generates the happy-path auth flow and stops. Tokens expire, users get kicked out mid-session, support tickets pile up. We implement the refresh token path with proper rotation and revocation.
Session fixation. Session ID not rotated after login. We rotate on every auth state change.
RBAC gaps. Admin routes protected on the frontend only. We add server-side middleware that re-checks roles on every privileged request.

Track 5: Deploy

No staging environment. Every push goes straight to production. We set up a staging branch, preview deployments, and a promotion workflow.
No rollback capability. We add versioned deploys and a one-command rollback.
Zero observability. No logs, no metrics, no alerts. We wire up structured logging (Pino or Winston), error tracking (Sentry), and a minimum viable alerting set: error rate spike, p95 latency spike, database connection saturation.

What Gets Fixed Week 1 vs Week 4

No rescue provider publishes this. We do, because predictability is the whole point of buying a productized service instead of rolling the dice on a freelancer.

Week 1: Triage and stop the bleeding

Day 1-2: Full audit. Database profiling. Secret scan. RLS policy review. Auth flow walkthrough. We deliver a ranked remediation list by end of day 2.
Day 3-4: Security track closes. Secrets rotated. RLS enforced. CORS tightened. Rate limits on auth.
Day 5: Critical database indexes added. Top 3 slow queries rewritten. Connection pooler installed.

At the end of week 1 your app is no longer a security liability and the database is no longer the primary bottleneck.

Week 2: Stabilize

Error handling wrapped around every API route. Sentry wired in.
OAuth refresh flow shipped. Session rotation in place.
Staging environment live. CI running tests on every PR.
Structured logging deployed. First alerting rules firing.

Week 3: Harden

Remaining database optimizations: the next 10 queries, query timeouts, statement timeout at the Postgres level.
Full RBAC audit and middleware rollout.
Idempotency on payment and write endpoints.
Load test at 10x current traffic. Breaking points documented.

Week 4: Ship and hand off

Runbooks for the top 5 failure modes we identified.
Architecture diagram of what the app actually does now (not what the AI tool thought it was building).
30-day Slack channel opens for follow-up questions.
Final walkthrough call with your team.

The $10K tier compresses this into 1-2 weeks by skipping tracks 3 and 5 and focusing on security + database + auth. The $50K tier extends it to 5-6 weeks for multi-tenant apps or migrations between stacks.

Transparent Pricing Bands

We publish pricing because the first question every founder asks a rescue provider is "what will this cost" and the second is "how do I know you won't scope-creep me."

$10K — Critical Fix (1-2 weeks)

For apps with 1-2 specific blocking issues. You know what is broken. You need it fixed, not re-audited.

Security track (secrets, RLS, CORS, rate limiting)
Auth track (refresh tokens, session rotation, RBAC)
Top 3 database queries optimized
One senior engineer, rotating across tracks
No observability stack, no CI/CD setup, no load testing

$25K — Standard Rescue (3-4 weeks)

The default engagement. All five tracks executed in parallel. This is what most funded startups need.

Full 5-track remediation
Staging environment + CI/CD pipeline
Sentry + structured logging + alerting
Load test at 10x current traffic
Runbooks and architecture documentation
30-day post-engagement Slack support

$50K — Complex Rescue (5-6 weeks)

For multi-tenant SaaS, apps with real money flows (payments, subscriptions), or codebases that need a framework migration as part of the fix.

Everything in Standard Rescue
Multi-tenant data isolation audit and remediation
PCI-adjacent security hardening for payment flows
Framework or database migration (e.g., SQLite to Postgres, Express to Fastify)
Load test at 50x current traffic
Two senior engineers working in parallel

Every engagement starts with a $2,500 paid diagnostic, credited toward the full engagement if you proceed. For a full cost breakdown across engagement types, see our cost to fix a vibe coded app guide.

A Real Example: Supabase RLS Rescue

One pattern we fix in almost every Lovable rescue: tables created without RLS, then later enabled with a catch-all policy.

-- What Lovable generated
create table public.invoices (
  id uuid primary key default gen_random_uuid(),
  user_id uuid references auth.users,
  amount_cents integer,
  created_at timestamptz default now()
);

-- RLS was off. Every authenticated user could read every invoice.

Our remediation:

alter table public.invoices enable row level security;

create policy "users read own invoices"
  on public.invoices for select
  using (auth.uid() = user_id);

create policy "users insert own invoices"
  on public.invoices for insert
  with check (auth.uid() = user_id);

create index invoices_user_id_idx on public.invoices (user_id);

Plus a CI check that fails the build if any new table lacks RLS:

select tablename
from pg_tables
where schemaname = 'public'
  and rowsecurity = false;

Three lines of SQL policy plus an index fix the data leak and the slow query in the same patch.

Failure Modes We See Every Time

Failure: Supabase connection pool exhaustion at ~40 concurrent users. Symptom: random 500s, remaining connection slots are reserved in logs. Fix: install Supavisor in transaction mode, set connection_limit=1 in the Prisma client, reduce function concurrency.

Failure: Cursor-generated JWT verification accepting any signature. Symptom: authenticated endpoints accessible with a forged token. Fix: verify with the actual JWKS, not a hardcoded secret copy-pasted from a tutorial.

Failure: Lovable-generated image upload endpoint with no size limit. Symptom: single user uploads 2GB of images, crashes the function, fills Supabase storage. Fix: client-side compression, server-side size cap, Cloudflare R2 for hot storage.

Who This Is For

Funded startups Seed through Series B with a vibe coded app that is breaking in production and needs remediation in weeks, not months. You do not have time to hire a senior engineer, onboard them for a month, and then watch them start fixing things. You need the playbook executed now.

If you are pre-launch and the app is not in production, you probably need architecture review instead. If the codebase is beyond rescue and needs a full rebuild, we will tell you during the diagnostic. See rebuild vs rescue engineering for how we make that call.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from your AI app production engineering service?

Production engineering is a 4-6 week planned engagement for apps that are working but need hardening before a growth push. Rescue is for apps that are on fire right now. The playbook overlaps, but rescue compresses the timeline and skips the nice-to-haves.

What if only one track applies to my app?

Then you want the $10K tier. We scope it during the $2,500 diagnostic. If after the diagnostic we find only security is broken and database is fine, we refund the difference or apply it to 30 days of follow-up support.

Do you work with Bolt, Replit Agent, and v0 codebases too?

Yes. The five failure tracks are stack-agnostic. We have rescued apps built with Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, Replit Agent, v0, Claude Artifacts, and hand-written Next.js code generated by GPT-4.

Can you rescue a Python/FastAPI backend or only JavaScript?

Both. Our engineers ship in TypeScript, Python, and Go. The database, auth, and security tracks are language-agnostic.

What happens after the 30-day Slack support window?

Most clients move into a retainer for ongoing production engineering, or they bring the work in-house with the runbooks we delivered. We do not lock you in. The goal of the rescue is to hand you back a codebase your team can maintain.

Will you sign an NDA before the diagnostic?

Yes. We sign a mutual NDA before any code access. Diagnostic access is read-only until the full engagement starts.

How quickly can you start?

For critical incidents (app down, active data breach), we can start within 24 hours. Standard engagements start within 3-5 business days of the diagnostic sign-off.

Stop the Bleeding This Week

Your vibe coded app is costing you users every day it stays broken. The five tracks are known. The playbook is published. The only variable is how fast you decide to fix it.

Get a free production audit and tell us which tracks are on fire. We respond within 24 hours with a triage plan and a pricing band. If your app needs something other than rescue, we will tell you — we do not sell engagements we cannot deliver.