Bring the prototype to production. Without a rewrite.
For founders who shipped with Replit, Bolt, Cursor, or a freelancer, hit traction, and now need code that survives Monday morning traffic.
Most rescues are triage, not rewrites.
The vibe-coded MVP is a real thing. Replit, Bolt, Lovable, Emergent, and Cursor can produce a working product faster than any team has ever produced one. They cannot produce a product that survives observability, scale, regulators, or a senior engineer's code review. Most rescue engagements we take are not rewrites. They are triage. What ships, what gets quarantined, what gets re-architected, in what order, on what timeline.
What changes when a Metafic pod is in your repo.
Triage week before anything else
Read the codebase, talk to the founder, talk to the first ten users. Output: a one-page rescue plan with three sequenced bets.
Quarantine the unsafe paths first
The auth flow, the payment flow, the data export. These get rewritten before any new feature work.
Move from no-test to critical-path tests in week two
Playwright on the top 10 user journeys. Not full coverage. The journeys that, if they break, the business stops.
Observability before optimization
Sentry, simple structured logs, a real database with real backups. So the next regression is debuggable.
Migrate off the no-code platform one module at a time
Not in a big-bang. Keep what is working. Move what hurts.
Who is on the pod for this work.
Pods scale up from here for Enterprise engagements.
Has done MVP rescues specifically. Used to reading unfamiliar AI-generated codebases.
Comfortable reading 10,000 lines of unfamiliar code fast and not panicking.
Critical-path test design from user journeys, not from a spec doc.
For migrating off Replit / Bolt / Lovable hosting to real infra.
The bugs that bite this stack.
Hardcoded secrets in the original prototype
Often live for months in a public repo. We rotate everything in week one.
User passwords stored in plaintext or weakly hashed
More common than founders realize. We migrate to a proper auth layer (Clerk, WorkOS, or rolled-our-own).
PII in form submissions outside the privacy policy
Engineering captures the field, the privacy policy does not mention it. We track.
Vendor APIs called from the frontend with client-side keys
Common with Stripe, Twilio, OpenAI in early prototypes. All move server-side in the first month.
Honest about scope.
We will not take a rescue where the founder is not honest about what is broken. The first week of a rescue is uncomfortable; if it does not get uncomfortable, we are not doing it right.
Common questions.
How long does a typical rescue take?
3 to 5 months depending on traffic and complexity. The first 4 weeks are usually 80% of the safety work.
Will you keep my Replit / Bolt / Lovable codebase?
Selectively. The UI prototype is often fine. The backend and auth almost never are.
Can you take over from a freelancer who ghosted?
Yes. Common engagement shape, especially in the last 18 months.
Do you do AI-generated code review?
Yes, as part of the triage. Spot-check first, then full review of the safety-critical paths.
Ready to scope it?
A 25-minute call. We will tell you what we would do, what we would not, and whether a pod is the right shape.
Or stay in the loop. One engineering teardown a week.