FOR PEOPLE BUILDING AN APP WITH AI
Launch your app. With a CTO in your corner.
You are building it yourself with Claude Code or OpenCode. We make sure it is safe, it works, and it is ready for real customers. A real CTO, in chat, every day, for $350 a month.
Every member starts with a free call. No card.
You have the idea. AI can write the code. What is missing is the person who has done this thirty times.
Most first apps do not fail because the idea was bad. They fail on the things nobody told you to check: who can see your customers' data, what happens when you change something after people are already using it, what to do the first time it breaks at 2am.
A CTO's whole job is knowing those things before they happen. Companies pay a great deal for one. A one-person product built with AI gets none of that, at exactly the moment it needs it most: the first real users, the first payment, the first bad actor.
Red Corner is that job, done for the people who cannot hire for it. You keep building with the tools you like. Your CTO is in the room while you do it: on the plan before you prompt, on the code before you ship, on the call when something goes wrong.
Four things, every month. The slice of a CTO that a one-person product actually needs.
Paste the error, the screenshot, or the thing you are about to build. You get an answer from a person, in plain language, with the exact next step and often the exact prompt to run. Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm Eastern, and all day Sunday.
Live, one subject at a time: logins, payments, backups, keeping your data safe, the bill. Bring your app. Leave with it fixed, or with a plan to fix it.
Every session and every video answer, searchable. The question you have at 2am has usually been answered on camera already.
Your roadmap, your risks, the "don't build that" conversation, the security questionnaire a customer just sent you. The conversation a founder with a CTO gets by default.
A simple question. A dangerous one. Answered before it costs you.
This is the shape of most days in the corner. The question sounds routine. The wrong answer deletes your customers.
I deployed my app and people are using it. Now I have to make changes to my database. What do I do?
Hi George, that is a big deal, and believe it or not engineering teams miss this one too. I have watched it happen. Good on you for asking before touching anything.
The short version: you never change a live database by hand. You write the change down as a file, you test it on a copy that runs on your laptop, and the deploy applies it for you. I looked at your project. You are on Next.js, Vercel and Postgres, so the prompt below is written for exactly that. Run it in Claude Code and ping me when it is done. I will review the code before anything runs against production.
One more thing, and it matters: you also need a copy of the database on your laptop, with some fake data in it, so you can practise every change from a clean start and production is never your test bed. Very few teams do this, even at big companies. Run this one first, then the migrations prompt. Watch the video before you start.
local-dev-prompt.mdPrompt to paste into Claude Code
Set up a local development database for this project so I can run it on my laptop from a clean, seeded database every time. Stack: Next.js, Postgres, Prisma. Do not touch production or any Vercel environment variable. - Create docker-compose.yml with one Postgres 16 service on port 5432, a named volume, and a healthcheck. - Add .env.local (git-ignored) with DATABASE_URL pointing at it, and a committed .env.example with placeholder values. Confirm .gitignore covers .env.local. - Create prisma/seed.ts with a small realistic dataset: 2 or 3 users including one admin, one of every core record, and one record in every edge state the UI must handle. Use fixed values, not random ones. - Add scripts: db:up, db:down, db:reset (drop the local db, replay every migration from zero, run the seed) and make "dev" start the database first. - Guardrail: seed.ts refuses to run unless DATABASE_URL contains localhost. Seeding production by accident is the failure we are designing against. Finish by running db:up, db:reset and dev, show me the output of each, then stop.
migrations-prompt.mdPrompt to paste into Claude Code
Set up controlled database migrations for this project. Stack: Next.js on Vercel, Postgres, Prisma. RULES - Never run prisma db push or prisma migrate reset against any database that has real data. Remove both from any script that could reach production. - Every schema change is a migration file, created against the LOCAL database only. - Additive changes only: new columns are nullable or have a default. No dropping or renaming columns. If a column has to go, it goes in a later migration after the code stops reading it. - Show me the generated SQL before anything is applied anywhere. PRODUCTION - Build command: prisma generate && prisma migrate deploy && next build. migrate deploy only applies pending migrations. It never generates, never resets. - Preview deployments must not migrate production. - Before the first production run, take a snapshot and tell me where it is. Finish by printing the migration SQL and the exact command you intend to run, against which database. Do not run anything against production until I say go.
Done. The change is in a file, it ran against the copy on my laptop, and I can reset to a clean database in one command. Nothing touched production.
Looking at it now. Two small things before we ship it, then you are good to go.
Last one, and then this app never goes backwards on you: we add tests that run automatically on every change, against that same local database. If a change breaks something, it never reaches your users. Same drill, run this and send me the output.
testing-prompt.mdPrompt to paste into Claude Code
Add a test setup to this project so every change is verified before it deploys. Stack: Next.js on Vercel, Postgres, Prisma, local database and seed already in place. UNIT TESTS - Install vitest. Start with the three most important pieces of logic: pricing, permissions, anything that touches money or deletes data. END-TO-END TESTS - Install Playwright. Boot the app against the local database, reset and seed before every run. Never point tests at production. - Write three flows: sign up and log in, the core thing a paying customer does, and the one thing that must never break. CI (GitHub Actions) - Run on every pull request and every push to main, with a Postgres service. - Steps: install, migrate, seed, unit tests, end-to-end tests. Upload the test report if it fails. - Add a branch protection rule on main requiring this to pass, so a red check means nothing ships. Do not weaken or skip a failing test to make CI green. Print the workflow file and the list of tests you wrote, then stop.
Illustrative exchange. Why it matters: changing a live database without this setup usually means an edit by hand, or a reset. That is how customer data disappears.
"Why can't I just ask the AI to check its own work?"
You can, and you should. It will find some things. Here is what it will not do: it will not volunteer that the code it just wrote leaves your users' data readable by anyone, because from where it sits, the feature works. It was asked to make login work. Login works.
A model answers the request in front of it. A CTO thinks about the day you are not in the room: the traffic spike, the leaked key, the customer who sends a security questionnaire, the AI agent that "cleans up" your live database. Those are not prompts you know to write until after they have happened to you.
Stanford researchers found that people using an AI assistant wrote less secure code, and were more confident it was secure. Perry, Srivastava, Kumar and Boneh, ACM CCS 2023.
What the research says about AI-built apps. Sources included.
None of this means you should stop building. It means someone should be checking.
The ways AI-built apps actually fail, and what a CTO in your corner catches.
Seventy entries in thirteen categories. Fourteen are reported incidents linked to public coverage. The rest are composites: names invented, failure real and recurring. Read it before it happens to you.
Not beginners. Not engineers. The people in between.
You are building something real and it has to hold up. That is the room. Not a course, not a Discord, not an agency.
- ✓You are building a web product or a mobile app that people will pay for, and you are building it yourself.
- ✓You use Claude Code or OpenCode, or you are ready to. Lesson 1 of the free course gets you there.
- ✓You have had the week where one fix broke three things, or you would like to skip it.
- ✓You would rather know what is wrong than hope nothing is.
- ✓You want to keep building it yourself, with an adult in the room.
- ✕You want someone to build it for you. That is an agency, and we can point you to a good one.
- ✕You want to learn to write code by hand from scratch. That is a bootcamp.
- ✕You want a big community to hang out in. That is a Discord.
- ✕You build with Lovable, Bolt, Replit or another app builder and want to stay there. Those tools cap what you can build, and we cannot take you past the cap.
A CTO helps you know what to build. More importantly, what not to build.
Where a CTO truly helps is in how you think about your code and how you organize it, like a professional engineer. You will build, maintain and deploy the way the best engineering teams do.
That is what lets you stay nimble and lean: you have 25 years of CTO experience behind you.
The person who answers.
Oshri Cohen
Chief Product & Technology Officer
companies served as fractional and interim CTO since 2018
engineering teams directed at once, across 7 countries
in software, 20 of them leading engineering
industries, from healthcare and logistics to education and commerce
A CTO's real job is not writing code. It is knowing, before anyone else, what is going to go wrong: which of your customers' data is accidentally public, which password is sitting where anyone can find it, which deploy has no way back, which feature should never have been built. Then making sure someone deals with it before a customer does.
Since 2018, Oshri has been that person for more than thirty companies. Red Corner is the same job, done for the builders who cannot hire for it. You keep building. He answers when it breaks, teaches the things that break, and sits down with you every month.
One price. Cancel with one email.
Month to month. Cancel any time with one email. Invoiced, so you can expense it.
Twelve months for the price of nine. Full refund within 30 days if it is not for you.
Every seat starts with a free call. No card until you are in.
A fractional CTO runs $3,000 to $10,000 a month and is built for funded teams. A one-off audit ends the moment it is delivered. A $37 community gives you four hundred people guessing. $350 is a real CTO, reachable, for a single product.
Three steps. The first one is free.
Two minutes. You get a confirmation by email. So does Oshri.
Thirty minutes about what you have built and what is going on with it. We make sure we can help, and that you are ready for the help. If not, we tell you what to do instead. Nobody pays before this conversation.
Monthly or annual. Chat, sessions, the library and your first 1:1 start that week.
Talk to your CTO before you commit to anything.
Every member starts with a call. No card, no sales deck. A conversation about what you built and where you want to take it.
In your corner.