One question, asked every single time, before anything AI just wrote goes anywhere near production:
What's the one thing about this that would break in production but not in testing, and how would I know if it did?
That's it. That's the whole prompt.
It works because it forces a specific answer instead of a reassurance. "Is this safe?" gets you "yes, this looks good." This question gets you an actual failure mode — a race condition under load, an environment variable that's set locally but not on the deploy target, a silent catch block swallowing an error instead of surfacing it.
Two real answers this question has actually surfaced for me: a scheduled job that existed in code but wasn't registered anywhere to actually run (found before it shipped, not a day and a half after), and a database client that worked fine locally but wasn't built for a serverless environment's connection limits.
Ask it after every meaningful piece of generated code, not just before launch. It's fast, it's specific, and it catches the exact category of bug that "looks done" hides best.
This is the check I run before Insidr code ships — see it live.
Try Insidr →Brands: partner with me
Keep reading
- PromptsThe Exact Prompts I Use to Go From Idea to Live Product in a WeekendThe prompts I use to go from a rough idea to something working without spending days going in circles.
- PromptsThe AI Codes I Actually Use to Build, Ship, and Not Get Hacked119 codes I actually use — the ones I reach for most, in full, plus the rest of the library.
- Prompts100 Image Codes for Locking Camera, Style, and MoodSlash codes for camera, product shots, UI mockups, lighting, and social-native looks — so you stop rewriting the same style paragraph.