The "build an app in 20 minutes" demos are real. The problem is they stop at the exact point engineering begins. So I gave five AI builders the same brief and graded them on production reality, not on the first pretty screen.
The brief: signup and login, per user private data, a subscription payment, and an AI feature that must not hallucinate. The four things every demo skips and every real app needs.
What I actually checked under the hood:
Auth. Not "is there a login screen" but is it real authentication and authorization. Can user A reach user B's rows.
Data layer. Is the schema sane. Are there constraints, or just a table the model guessed at.
