Ask what could fail silently, and make each of those tell you. Most small apps have no idea anything is wrong until someone complains — and most people do not complain, they leave. An email to yourself is enough to change that.
The prompt
List everything in this app that could fail without anyone noticing — a failed save, an email that did not send, a payment that succeeded but delivered nothing. For each one, add something that tells me: an email to my address, or a visible error. Do not add a monitoring service.
| When to use it | The week you launch, before you have users rather than after. |
|---|---|
| Why it is worded that way | Silent failure is the expensive kind. A visible error costs you one annoyed user who tells you; a silent one costs you every user it touches and you never learn. The last clause keeps the fix proportionate — at this size you need to be told, not to have a dashboard you will not open. |
Start with the money path
Payment succeeded and delivery failed is the one failure that is worse than being down, because the customer has paid and is waiting. If you alert on one thing, alert on that.
Send it to yourself, not to a system
An email in your inbox gets read. A log line in a dashboard does not. Sophistication can come later, when the volume makes an inbox impractical — which is a good problem.
Check it actually arrives
An alert you have never seen fire is a hope. Break something on purpose once and confirm the message reaches you, because alerting that was never tested is the most common kind of alerting there is.
The Build Prompt Pack
This is one of 57 prompts, from the phase "The week after launch". The pack has the rest, each with the same reasoning underneath, plus the research they are built on and a house-rules file you paste in once.
Tools this applies to
| Tool | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Resend | Transactional email that actually arrives. | Free tier |
| Vercel | Hosting. Puts a project live on a real address with one command. | Free tier |
| Plausible | Simple, privacy-friendly visitor stats with no cookie banner. | ~€9/mo |
| Umami | Same idea, free if you host it yourself. | Free self-hosted |
Every tool has its own page with what it costs and who should skip it. Some links are affiliate links.
More prompts like this
The prompt for adding payments safely
How do you add payments to an app without handling card details yourself?
The prompt for the screens nobody designs
Why does an AI-built app look broken when there is no data yet?