Almost nobody loses to a bad idea. They lose in the gap between the vision and the build. He closes the gap.

Foundation, core features, additional features, mock data, enhancements, mock monetization, testing, live subscription, launch readiness, live production, feedback loop. Left to right, with a gate at every seam. It is boring on purpose. A skipped gate is how a product reaches launch day with an auth layer nobody tested and a bill nobody can explain.

A code reviewer reads the diff for production readiness. A database reviewer reads every schema change, every row level security policy, and every index before a migration is ever applied. They run independently of the person who wrote the code, and they have blocked plenty of his own work.

That has caught the failures that actually cost money: a column grant that would have let a reporter dismiss their own abuse report, an update policy that was a table takeover primitive, an anonymous grant on a function whose own guard was silently vacuous. Every one of those was found before a user ever met it.

Every schema change is a migration file, reviewed and reversible. No ad hoc destructive SQL, ever, and nothing reaches production without an explicit human decision. Row level security on every user facing table, so no client query can read another person's rows even if somebody points a script straight at the API.

The rule underneath it: a guarantee that only holds in the application layer is not a guarantee. It has to hold at the database, because the database is what an attacker actually reaches.

The point of the work is not a dependency on him. It is a codebase your next engineer can read, a schema they can extend, documentation that says what is true, and the keys in your hand. Fundable, launchable, and yours.