I have been exclusively doing this in the past year, selling my services as “hardening vibe-coded prototypes for production” or “helping early stage startups scale”.

In the best cases, they were able to reach funding or paying users. Architecture debt is one of the worst kinds of tech debt, so if you set it up right, it’s really hard to mess up.

In the worst case, after my contract ended, the CEO fired the whole US engineering team and replaced them with offshore resources. This was an example of messing up despite the architectural and procedural safeguards we built.