Why AI-Generated Apps Miss the Real 'Done': Beyond the Demo

The demo looked done. Then I clicked submit on an empty form, and the whole thing came apart in a way no screenshot could have shown me.

A landing page is one render path. An app is at least six — loading, empty, error, recovering, offline, partial-success. AI-generated demos and most hand-rolled ones ship the first two and quietly skip the rest, because screens without states are how a Friday afternoon turns into a Sunday afternoon.

I want to talk about the three states every kit should ship by default — error recovery, bespoke empty states, and skeletons that mirror the layout they're filling — and the concrete design checklist that makes them hard to skip.

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This is an excerpt. Read the full post at otf-kit.dev/blog/errors-empty-loading-states — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. Browse the kits →