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Rescuing a SaaS Platform After a Vibe-Coded Feature Destabilized Production

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After a rapidly developed reporting module began causing platform-wide outages, an established SaaS company turned to Altoros to diagnose the damage, stabilize critical workflows, and establish patterns for sustainable feature development.

Rescuing a SaaS Platform After a Vibe-Coded Feature Destabilized Production

About the project

By conducting a comprehensive 3-day audit followed by a 10-day stabilization sprint, Altoros traced cascading failures back to a hastily built feature and identified how its integration had compromised the stability of the entire platform.

Thanks to the implementation of proper service boundaries, error handling, and monitoring, the customer reduced critical incidents by 94% and eliminated the checkout failures that were costing an estimated $180,000 in lost monthly revenue.

With the new feature properly isolated and hardened, the organization was able to keep the functionality customers loved while removing the instability it had introduced.

The documentation and architectural patterns established during the engagement gave the team a blueprint for adding future features without risking platform stability.

The customer

Based in North America, the company operates a B2B project management platform designed for creative agencies and marketing teams. The platform serves 12,000+ daily active users across 800+ organizations in 35 countries. Built over five years with a solid engineering foundation, the product had achieved strong market position and steady growth - until a new feature release changed everything.

The need

Under pressure to ship a competitive reporting and analytics module, the product team decided to accelerate development using AI-assisted coding tools. A small team used Cursor and GitHub Copilot to build in weeks what would normally take months. The feature demoed beautifully and launched to enthusiastic customer feedback.

Within days, problems emerged. The platform began experiencing intermittent outages. Checkout flows started failing during peak hours. Integrations with Slack and HubSpot would randomly stop syncing. Most puzzlingly, these failures often occurred in parts of the system that seemed completely unrelated to the new reporting module.

The engineering team spent weeks trying to diagnose the issues. Each fix seemed to introduce new problems. The vibe-coded module had been woven into the platform in ways that weren’t immediately visible - shared database connections, intertwined authentication flows, and undocumented dependencies that only revealed themselves under production load.

The CEO faced a difficult choice: roll back a feature that customers were already using and loving, or find a way to stabilize it. They chose Altoros based on our structured approach to diagnosing and fixing codebases compromised by rapid AI-assisted development.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following business-critical issues:

The money path was broken. Checkout and subscription upgrade flows failed intermittently during peak hours, directly blocking revenue. The failures correlated with reporting module usage but occurred in completely different parts of the codebase - making diagnosis nearly impossible for the internal team.

A single feature was holding the roadmap hostage. The team couldn’t ship any updates without risking new outages. Every deployment became a gamble. Product development ground to a halt while engineering played whack-a-mole with production fires.

Customer trust was eroding fast. Enterprise clients who had been with the platform for years started asking hard questions. Two accounts representing $400K in ARR issued formal warnings about service reliability. The sales team stopped scheduling demos during US business hours because they couldn’t guarantee the platform would be stable.

Rolling back wasn’t a real option. Customers had already built workflows around the new reporting features. Removing it would mean breaking their processes and admitting a very public failure - right as competitors were circling.

The solution

Days 1-3 (Audit). Engineers at Altoros conducted a comprehensive system audit, focusing on how the new module interacted with the existing platform. The team mapped hidden dependencies, identifying 7 critical points where the vibe-coded feature had been tightly coupled to core systems. A clear picture emerged: the module was hijacking database connections meant for checkout. This exhausted the shared database, causing timeouts that the authentication service misinterpreted as expired sessions — triggering a retry surge that cascaded across the platform.

Days 4-6 (Critical Fixes). Based on the “Yellow” verdict from the audit, the team began untangling the most dangerous dependencies. The reporting module was given its own database connection pool, isolated from transaction-critical flows. Authentication was decoupled so that reporting sessions couldn’t trigger platform-wide token refreshes. Critical bug fixes addressed the checkout failures that had been causing direct revenue loss.

Days 7-10 (Architecture Stabilization). The developers implemented proper service boundaries around the reporting module, with circuit breakers that would let it fail gracefully without taking down the rest of the platform. Resource limits were established so the feature couldn’t starve other services. The team also established automated test coverage for the integration points that had caused the most damage.

Days 11-13 (Observability & Handoff). To prevent future features from causing similar problems, Altoros implemented observability to detect and flag unexpected dependencies early. The in-house team received architecture diagrams showing exactly what had gone wrong and why, along with guidelines for safely integrating rapidly-developed features. Finally, the experts provided runbooks for common failure scenarios and a checklist for future vibe-coded additions.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer kept the feature their users loved while eliminating the instability it had introduced. Critical incidents dropped by 94%, from an average of 17 per month to just 1. Checkout completion rates improved from 71% to 98%, directly recovering an estimated $180,000 in monthly revenue. The two enterprise accounts that had issued warnings renewed their contracts. Most importantly, the engineering team regained the ability to ship new features confidently. The company now has the architectural patterns and monitoring needed to experiment with rapid development approaches without risking platform stability.

94%

reduction in
critical incidents

12,000+

daily active
users supported

$180K

monthly revenue
recovered

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Alex Tsimashenka

Alex Tsimashenka

Business Development Director

a.tsimashenka@altoros.com +1 (650) 419-3379