Preflight Checks

Ship with confidence. Systematic production readiness checks for any software project — web apps, mobile apps, APIs, games, CLIs.

You built the thing. But is it ready to ship? These playbooks walk you through 8 audits, a go/no-go checklist, 72 hours of post-launch monitoring, and a rollback decision tree. Stack-agnostic, tool-agnostic, and designed to work with AI coding assistants or on their own.

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What's Included

Document	Purpose	When to Use
Production Readiness Playbook	8 systematic audits covering quality, security, compliance, accessibility, performance, SEO, ops, and open-source readiness	Weeks before launch
Pre-Launch Checklist	Binary go/no-go gate with MUST / SHOULD / NICE tiers	Day before launch
Post-Launch Runbook	Hour-by-hour monitoring guide with platform-specific sections	First 72 hours after launch
Rollback Decision Tree	Severity triage — rollback, hotfix, or accept and monitor	When something breaks
Start Here	One prompt that runs the full process end-to-end	Getting started

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The Flow

graph LR
    A[Audits] --> B[Checklist]
    B --> C[Launch]
    C --> D[Monitor 72h]
    C --> E{Problem?}
    E -- yes --> F[Rollback Tree]
    F --> C

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The 8 Audits

The Production Readiness Playbook covers:

1. Quality — Tests, CI, code health, pre-commit hooks
2. Security — Secrets, dependencies, auth, headers, input validation
3. Compliance & Legal — Privacy policies, cookie consent, GDPR/CCPA, EULA, platform rules
4. Accessibility — WCAG AA, keyboard navigation, screen readers, color contrast
5. Performance — Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, bundle size, caching
6. SEO & Discoverability — Meta tags, structured data, sitemaps, social cards
7. Operational Readiness — Deployment, rollback, monitoring, alerting, backups
8. Open-Source Readiness — Community files, licensing, versioning, contributor experience, discoverability

Each audit is a self-contained prompt you can copy into any AI coding assistant. Skip audits that don't apply to your project type — the playbook tells you which ones.

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Quick Start

1. Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/penguinboi/preflight-checks.git

2. Open your project in an AI coding assistant

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, or any tool that can read files and analyze code.

3. Paste this prompt

Read /path/to/preflight-checks/start-here.md and follow its instructions for this project.

The assistant will assess your project, recommend which audits to run, execute them in order, and walk you through the pre-launch checklist.

You can also run individual audits standalone — copy any audit prompt from the playbook into a conversation with your project open.

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Works With

• AI coding assistants: Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, or any assistant that can read local files
• Manually: The audit prompts are structured checklists — run them yourself without AI
• Any stack: Static sites, SPAs, mobile apps, APIs, games, CLIs, libraries
• Any platform: AWS, Vercel, App Store, Google Play, Steam, itch.io, npm, self-hosted

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When to Re-run

Trigger	What to run
Quarterly	Quality + Security audits
After major changes	The relevant audit (UI changes → Accessibility, new data collection → Compliance, etc.)
New launch	Full cycle — all 8 audits, checklist, monitoring

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License

MIT — see LICENSE. Built by Penguinboi Software.