Your chatbot got you this far. Here’s what to do next.
You’ve been building with an AI assistant, and it worked, right up until it didn’t. It can’t hold your whole system in its head anymore. It doesn’t have access to your hosting or your database. It keeps fixing one thing and quietly breaking another. That isn’t you doing something wrong, and it isn’t the tool failing you. It’s the edge of what a chat window was ever going to do alone. Here’s the honest next step, whether you hire us or someone else entirely.
Save your work first
Do these four things before you touch anything else, including before you keep chatting with the assistant hoping one more prompt fixes it.
- Export or copy the code now. Get it out of the AI tool and into a place you control, even if that's just a zip file on your own machine.
- Save the chat transcript. It's the only complete record of what you asked for and what the assistant decided on your behalf. Whoever picks this up next will want it.
- Write down every account involved. Hosting, domain registrar, database, payment processor, and any third-party API keys the app depends on. If you don't know, that's worth finding out now rather than later.
- Change nothing else yet. Don't start ripping out code or trying random fixes under pressure. A stuck app is a solvable problem; a stuck app with three new half-finished changes on top of it is a harder one.
How to vet whoever you bring in
This applies no matter who you hire, and it holds us to the same standard we're asking you to use.
- Fixed scope before open-ended hourly. A defined first step with a real price tells you what you're buying before you owe anything more. Open-ended hourly work with no first deliverable is a much harder thing to evaluate.
- A public price and a sample deliverable. Someone confident in their work will show you what it looks like and what it costs on their own site, not just on a sales call.
- You keep the repository and every account. In your name, from day one. If that's not on the table, that's the whole conversation right there.
- References you can check yourself. A phone call, a message to a past client, something that doesn't route back through their own marketing.
- Check the firm and the person on LinkedIn. A real company page and a real person with a work history, not a brand-new profile with no history behind it. Verify us the same way: Date Palm Media on LinkedIn and Joseph Dattilo on LinkedIn.
- The walk-away test. If you fired this person tomorrow, what would you be holding? The honest answer should be "everything," not "nothing."
Write the handoff brief
Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or whatever assistant you already have open. It works the same in any of them, and the output is yours to bring to whoever you hire — us or anyone else.
I built an app using an AI coding assistant and I'm stuck. Help me write a handoff brief that a professional developer can use to pick this up. Ask me questions if you need more detail, then write the brief covering: 1. What the app does - the core purpose, in plain language, for someone who has never seen it. 2. Stack and tools - what platform or tool built it (for example Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, Cursor, or hand-written code), the languages or frameworks involved, and how it's hosted. 3. What works today - the features and flows that function as intended. 4. What's broken - the specific things that don't work: what I expected, what happened instead, and anything I've already tried. 5. Access inventory - every account this app touches (hosting, domain, database, payment processor, third-party APIs) and who currently holds the login for each. 6. What "done" looks like - the outcome I actually need, separate from any feature list, so whoever picks this up can tell when the job is finished. Write the brief in plain text I can paste into an email or share with a developer.
What we do at this exact moment
If you want a second opinion from a human before you commit to anything, our starting point is the same one every engagement can start with: the Production Blueprint. It's a fixed-scope diagnostic, starting at $2,500, that inventories your code, your infrastructure, and your risks, and ends with a prioritized plan and a real estimate. The plan is yours whoever builds it — some clients take it and execute with another team entirely, and that's a fine outcome.
You don't have to take our word for what that looks like. You can inspect a representative sample Blueprint before you spend anything. If the shape of your problem is closer to a stalled AI prototype than a finished app, Prototype-to-Production Rescue is the fuller version of this same path.
Custody is explicit from the start: your repository, your accounts, and every credential we touch gets rotated at handoff and never retained. We built it that way because the alternative gives one vendor too much leverage over your own software, and that's not a position we want to put you in.
Asked by nearly everyone in this spot
Is my AI-built code garbage?
No. It proved the idea, got you real users or a real demo, and did it fast. Treat it as a working draft with genuine value, not something to throw away. The question worth asking is not whether it was AI-built, but which parts still hold up under production conditions.
Do I have to start over?
Usually not. Whether to keep, harden, or replace any given part is an evidence question, not a default answer, and a rewrite-first instinct is usually the expensive option. A short, fixed-scope inventory tells you what to keep before you commit to anything larger.
Does it matter which AI tool built it?
Not much, and it shouldn’t change who you can hire. Lovable, Bolt, Replit, v0, Cursor, and a dozen others produce the same underlying shape: a working frontend, thin or missing backend logic, and no production hardening. Any competent developer should be able to work from whatever you have.
What does this cost?
Our starting point is the Production Blueprint: starting at $2,500, and most fall between $2,500 and $7,500 depending on the codebase, workflows, integrations, and stakeholder count. That covers the inventory and the plan, not the build. The plan is yours whoever builds it.
Can you work from just my chat transcript?
Yes, a transcript plus the deployed app is a real starting point; it shows us what you asked for and what the tool actually did with it. The handoff brief above makes the first call shorter, because the access questions and the "what’s broken" list are already answered before we sit down.
Tell us where the app stands.
Joseph reads every note and replies himself. If it isn’t a fit, he’ll say so and point you somewhere useful.
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