Plain-language definitions for the vocabulary of AI-assisted software development and production readiness.
Looking for an audit instead? By tool or by situation.
An AI codebase audit is a fixed-scope, senior engineering review of an application's architecture, security, dependencies, testing, and deployment readiness, designed to catch the specific failure patterns AI coding tools can leave behind before real users do.
Vibe coding is building software primarily by prompting an AI tool and iterating on what looks right in the browser, rather than writing or carefully reviewing the underlying code yourself.
Production readiness is whether a piece of software is actually safe to run with real users, real data, and real payments, not just whether it works when you click through it.
PRISM is Mati Systems' framework for measuring production readiness across five dimensions: Production, Reliability, Integrity, Simplicity, and Maintainability.
AI coding guardrails are rules and boundaries that constrain what an AI coding agent can do, like which files it can touch or what conventions it must follow, enforced before the agent acts, not caught afterward in review.
Production hardening is a focused engineering sprint that fixes the highest-risk issues an audit identifies, before a launch, a handoff, or a fundraising round.
AI-generated technical debt is the specific flavor of technical debt that comes from AI-assisted development: duplicated logic across files, inconsistent conventions, and code that looks finished but was never fully verified, as opposed to debt from deliberate shortcuts taken under deadline pressure.