The Gap Between "Built" and "Production-Ready" (And Why AI Builders Won't Tell You About It) You shipped something in Lovable or Bolt in two days. It works. Your co-founder tested it. You showed a customer and they said "this is exactly what I need." Then you ask the obvious question: how do we actually run this? That's when you hit the wall. AI builders are optimized for iteration, not production. They're brilliant at turning ideas into working interfaces fast. But they're not infrastructure platforms. Your database lives on their servers. Your code is locked into their export format. There's no rollback, no deployment history, no real CI/CD pipeline. If something breaks in production, you restart and hope. This isn't a criticism of the builders. They're solving a different problem. But if you're a founder with real users and real revenue, you need something different. Here's what actually matters when you move to production: Database ownership. Right now, your data lives on the builder's infrastructure.…