Vibe coding is fine for discovering the product shape. The failure mode starts when the same chat-driven edits become the release process: no branch protections, no tests on push, and no way to roll back when a prompt change breaks auth.

A practical bar is simple. One repo the company owns, a pipeline that runs your real checks on every PR, staging that mirrors production enough to catch config mistakes, and a deploy you can reverse without heroics. Until that exists, you still have a prototype with customers attached.

Ascendra Ventures often packages that first production chapter as a fixed-price atomic problem: CI/CD, secrets, and the boring reliability work that turns a demo into something you can put in front of paying users. The workflow in this post is the right starting map.