AI will write your code. But not your product

There's a lot of talk right now about AI agents, vibe coding, and building products with almost no developers. And it's largely true. Anthropic openly says they've nearly stopped writing code by hand. I went through this myself building Growly. Anyone who's tried putting something together in Cursor, Lovable, or with Claude Code can see it: the barrier to entry has dropped dramatically.

But there's a dangerous distortion in this conversation. If code got cheaper, the thinking goes, products got cheaper too. That "building a service" is now almost free.

In practice — no. AI has dramatically reduced the cost of execution. But it hasn't touched the hardest part: an idea rooted in a real problem. You still have to find it, validate it, live it through conversations with real people. Understand where the value is and what someone will actually pay for. And that's just the beginning.

Then comes operational reality: partnerships, go-to-market, team, org setup. Breaking through the noise when you have three seconds of someone's attention. Finding a way to reach a real person who will actually trust you.

Agents help you execute.

But making something part of reality — that takes founder energy, persistence, and belief. Not "shipped and forgot."

The paradox is that AI tools bring us back to what matters most — the human. Trust, conversation, real contact. That can't be automated. It runs on the time, attention, focus, and energy of the people actually doing the work.

Here's what has genuinely changed though: a technical co-founder used to be non-negotiable. No CTO, no startup. Today your CTO is Claude Code at $100 a month. And that unlocks solo founders who simply couldn't have started before.

The real shift isn't that "anyone can build a product." It's that the price of the right question has gone up sharply: what's actually worth building — and who can see it through. That's what's expensive now.