7 questions every vibe-coded app must answer

1Who has the authority to approve this?

Most teams can name who built an app faster than they can name who is allowed to say yes to it. The request goes to whoever can turn a server on, and that person becomes the approver because their name is attached to the infrastructure.

Put the decision with a named role before the next request arrives. Otherwise every app gets approved by whoever is easiest to ask.

2What happens if the answer is no?

A rejection has to actually end the app. If the builder keeps running it from a laptop with the same data connections, the only thing that changed is who can see it.

Enterprise-sanctioned platform adoption reduces security vulnerabilities compared to prohibition — blocking local agents outright forces the activity underground instead of ending it.^1,2

So the useful version of no comes with somewhere sanctioned for the app to go instead.

3Who owns it once it's live?

Someone's side project turns into a system the business depends on, and the ownership question never gets settled. It becomes a product inside the company that nobody signed up to run.

With no name attached, the owner ends up being whoever gets paged when it breaks. That person never agreed to it.

4What can it reach, and who decided that?

Most vibe-coded apps connect to real systems, and they often hold more access than the job needed. Scoping access down takes work, and leaving the default connection in place takes none.

Get a list of every system the app touches, and find out who granted each connection.

5Who finds out when it breaks?

An app nobody watches can fail for weeks before anyone notices. It usually surfaces later as a support ticket or a compliance question that nobody can trace back to the app.

Name the person who gets told when it goes down, and do it before it goes live.

6What happens when the builder leaves, or the model changes?

Gartner calls the prototype-to-production gap “the defining constraint in this market,” to be treated as “a planning constant, not a temporary limitation.”¹

An app only one person knows how to fix will break the week they leave. An app pinned to a model version will break when that version is retired. Ask who handles both before you approve it.

7Who's accountable if nobody decides at all?

Plenty of vibe-coded apps are running right now without anyone having approved them, because making the decision takes longer than building the app did.

Every quarter without a decision adds another app that nobody's name is on. At some point someone asks who approved it, and the answer is that nobody did.

Answering seven questions per app works until there are more apps than people to answer them. The other option is to attach the answers at deploy: single sign-on and identity on every app, scoped role-based access, managed secrets, an immutable log, a named owner, and cost attribution, applied when the app ships rather than argued over afterwards.