The demo trap: it worked in the boardroom, then a real user broke it in ten seconds

Vibe-coded apps get built and tested against one perfect path — one user, clean data, ideal conditions — and that path is never what real users take.

The demo goes great: one user, a tidy dataset, a smooth click-through, a standing ovation. Then a real customer opens the app and everything falls apart, because real users don't follow the demo script. They paste weird characters into a name field. They hit back three times mid-checkout. They upload a 200MB file where a photo was expected. They're on a phone from 2019, on a connection that drops mid-request. None of that showed up in testing, because none of it was tested.

That gap — between "works on my laptop" and "works for everyone" — is where teams have burned six figures chasing a "technology problem" that was never about the technology. It was about what never got tested.

Two checks from this doctrine

Real value, not a teaser — two of the 5 checks in full. The rest are in the one-pager.

If you've only ever tested the happy path, you haven't tested the app — you've tested the demo.