The Pre-Launch Checklist for Cursor & v0 Power Users (2026 Edition)

You spent the last three weeks building your MVP using Cursor IDE, v0, and Claude Code. Your landing page looks stunning, authentication is connected, and your Product Hunt launch post is drafted.

Before you press submit and send thousands of visitors to your server, take 10 minutes to run through this tactical pre-launch checklist built specifically for AI-generated codebases.

1. Environment Variable & Secret Leakage Check

AI coding agents frequently hardcode fallback test keys directly into source code during rapid prototyping sessions:

```typescript // 🚨 DANGER: Hardcoded fallback secret left in client component const STRIPE_KEY = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_STRIPE_KEY || "pk_test_51Mz..."; ```

Action: Grep your repository for `process.env` fallback defaults. Verify that secret keys (`sk_live_...`, `whsec_...`, `DATABASE_URL`) are strictly loaded from server-side environment variables and never exposed to client-side bundles (`NEXT_PUBLIC_`).

2. Unhandled Async Exceptions in Server Actions

Next.js Server Actions and API routes generated by LLMs often swallow database timeouts or return HTTP 200 statuses during internal failures.

Action: Audit every API route handler to ensure database errors return explicit HTTP 500 error responses and trigger error logging rather than returning empty objects (`{}`).

3. Dependency Registry Verification

AI coding models frequently invent non-existent package dependencies (e.g. `@auth/nextjs-stripe-adapter`).

Action: Run an AST import audit against your `package.json` manifest to confirm every imported library exists on the public npm registry and uses locked version tags.

4. Client-Side Bundle Hydration & Image Optimization

v0 and Bolt scaffolds often import large unoptimized SVG assets or render massive inline JSON blobs in client components.

Action: Move static data mocks out of React client components into static JSON assets or server component wrappers to optimize initial PageSpeed scores.