I strongly believe that this is a false and outdated take.
Code being the easy part was predicated on how long it took to build a product, and the impact that had on product management, sales, and marketing.
When the time to build collapses, all product/sales/design/martketing mistakes are forgiven. You can pivot so fast, that mistakes in other domains dont matter as much and are reversible
All of the axioms we previously held true need to be rethought
don't worry that we got the wrong requirements from the customer, chose an impossible deadline, priced it wrong, and there's no market, we can just vibe code our way out of it??
The point is that even in case of total product management failure, the cost of failing is much lower both in time and money.
I don't see it. In my experience with AI/Claude so far, building something with AI then changing direction half way through is a great way to generate garbage structure and garbage code. It takes time to dig yourself out of that hole, possibly more than if you had just slowly built by hand from the beginning all. Maybe I'm holding it wrong.
If you switch directions with hand crafted code you have a mess too and a large amount of tedious refactoring work to do.
Which should be perfect work for Ai.
It might make failure faster, but that doesn't mean it's cheaper.
Users will churn quick if you aren't reliable or useful and a security incident can be company-ending for a startup.
Company-ending is a form of failure. The quicker you do that, the quicker you can start your next company.
In an odd way you’re absolutely proving the article’s point. The requirements, deadline, pricing, idea, implementation, customer story, these are the things that matter and are hard. Compared to that, code is easy.
>When the time to build collapses, all product/sales/design/marketing mistakes are forgiven
I must be living in topsy turvey land because this is literally the opposite of what is true. When the time to build collapses, those things become the criticality of the entire product. From a customer perspective, those were always the things that mattered, the customer story. No customer cares how a thing was coded, they’ve ALWAYS cared about all those other things.
nah youre missing it, if time to build takes 9 months, you better get the product right.
if time to build takes 2 months, just build it and iterate.
or just rebuild the product to the customers liking...
I’m not missing anything. Customers getting what they want earlier is a good thing. If the product is flawed, it will be outcompeted by a product that is better designed for customers. You’re sidestepping like crazy my dude
Because we don't need to worry about uptime, customer satisfaction, or data integrity.