As asked
You built a customer-facing prototype with AI assistance and users love it. How do you decide what must change before it becomes production software?
Sample answer outline
Start by separating validated product value from implementation quality. The candidate should assess security, auth, data correctness, observability, performance, accessibility, error recovery, testing, and maintainability. Strong answers include a rewrite-or-harden decision based on code shape, product urgency, and the cost of carrying prototype assumptions. They should preserve the parts that created user value while removing brittle shortcuts such as local-only state, hardcoded IDs, or hidden manual steps. The trap is either shipping the prototype unchanged or rebuilding it so slowly that the product learning decays.
Expect these follow-ups
- What prototype shortcut is acceptable for a pilot but not for production?
- How do you communicate the hardening work to a non-technical founder?
- When is a rewrite cheaper than incremental cleanup?