Living with “AI built my product” FOMO

Sharing our latest investor update, and why things are about to get even worse

It’s 1am, you are midway through your 15th TikTok of someone describing the “ridiculously simple” product they built with AI that is now making them rich. You are now convinced that a single AI-ified adult can easily achieve the GDP of a small nation.

You, meanwhile, are still doing things the same way you were 9 months ago. You have been left behind, and without proper intervention you will surely become food for the AGI overlord.

That feeling of AI FOMO is something anyone can relate to, but it is especially acute in the startup world. Founders and product managers are watching videos of engineers shipping complex products in 10 minutes and thinking not-so-nice things about the engineers on their team who said the 6 month timeline “feels ambitious.”

Unfortunately I can’t cure the FOMO because it is increasingly true you are wasting time and money if you aren’t using AI. Over the past few months we’ve stumbled into what is clearly the future for product development — developers pushing AI to build products 10 to 100X cheaper. We’ve seen products that were originally quoted for $100k get done for 5. The FOMO, if anything, should be bigger. 

At the same time, the people who are able to build stuff with AI 100X faster are using fairly dark magic given the current state of tooling. For one thing, none of the “no code” tools really work unless you can code. Yes if you’re smart you can get Claude to write code for you and become an engineer without knowing how it works, but the people who are successfully doing that are mostly A) product people that already mostly understand how code works and B) people with a lot of time on their hands. 

If you want to spend the next 6 months learning how to build stuff incredibly fast with AI, the flow the real pros are using can be boiled down to:

1. Generate most of the code with Claude/OpenAI/boilerplates

2. Massage it into the scaffolding of a product

3. Use Cursor to build the last 20% alongside an inline AI

4. Use v0 to generate components and shortcut the front end development

5. Test and squash bugs 

There are other products involved, but that’s the stack for 95% of good cyborgs right now. Every one of those steps is a deep rabbit hole of its own, and the people moving the fastest have been experimenting and building their own workflows for a year or two at least. Not to mention the fact that it is genuinely hard to build these workflows inside of a company because make a lot of tradeoffs that only work for certain kinds of products (especially standalone MVPs). If you are a bank and one of your engineers uses AI to whip up a product where any line of code might be a security risk, you will fire that engineer and I’m not going to stop you.

So of course, it’s nuanced. You should feel the pressure to use AI to move faster, but you should also appreciate that going full cyborg is not as easy as it might seem on Twitter or TikTok.

The roboagency revolution

People talk about how AI will democratize access to development, and it will, but it is also going to increase the delta between the top 1% of builders and everyone else. Working closely with those AI-augmented engineers over the past few months has convinced us that AI FOMO is about to get a lot worse. In fact, we’re betting the company on it. 

I haven’t done this in the past, but I want to share the update we sent our investors last week because it summarizes our insights and conviction on this emerging class of “roboagencies.”

We’re officially rebranding it to Robo and we’ll share more details as we continue to come out of stealth. A lot of people tell me this feels too good to be true, and it’s certainly the case that not all projects are a good fit for a roboagency right now — as the tech matures, that slice will increase. But if your MVP is a good fit a general rule of thumb is that we can take a project that would normally take 1-3 months and cost ~$50k and ship it in 1-2 weeks for ~5k. If you’re curious whether it would work for an idea you have, I’m happy to take a look even if you’re just curious to have that data point.

-Joey