This was the first week of our engineering accelerator where we were encouraged to use AI-assisted coding. Until now, I’ve been doing the coding equivalent of working by candlelight. I wonder if electricity had this big of an impact on productivity.
Having worked in tech for 15 years (as a product manager at places like WhatsApp and Peloton, and as a startup founder) I’ve seen teams of engineers and designers take months to build a fully featured app: sign-up, user accounts, a social graph, game mechanics.
Now, with just myself and AI-assisted coding, I built all of that in six days. What struck me was how similar it felt to working with a real team (except you're the one doing all the context switching). You write a spec like a PM, feed it to Cursor to engineer it, hop into Figma to design some UI, generate custom images in Sora, then drop them back into Cursor. A tidy little product and design team of one.
When you combine this AI workflow with off-the-shelf backend services like Supabase for databases or Expo for cross-platform mobile, software starts to feel like building with Legos. (Still hard to built great software, but the building blocks are clear).
The larger arc here is that software is becoming more accessible as a medium. Nearly everything is becoming easy to generate. Hopefully, as the paints become widely available, we get more creative and amazing paintings. (We’ll get some trash paintings, too. 🙂)
From a startup perspective, UX can still be part of your defensibility, but the cost to clone it is trending toward zero. Data, brand, and network effects have always mattered, but they feel even more critical now. Distribution and marketing over the next 5 years still feels unpredictable, especially as search and discovery shift toward LLMs. People are already talking about “AI SEO” (getting your product to rank in ChatGPT) which might be huge. But will it just turn into the next Google Products (i.e., an impersonal algorithm driven by ads and the middle of the bell curve)?
I do feel some conviction that one thing hasn’t changed: the best products still grow by human word of mouth. No matter how easy creation tools become, generating that may be as hard as ever. You just really gotta build things that kick ass.