Reading this the day before I launch my own product. I built it over several months while working full time. The work I do on my own thing feels completely different than the work I do for someone else. One drains me. The other makes me feel like myself. Tomorrow I find out of the product works.

Good luck, and please don't be discouraged if it takes 20 launches to figure out what works! That's completely normal.

Good luck! You might not find anything out tomorrow, but it still might work in the long run.

For people who couldn’t code at all before, AI coding tools don’t replace skill, they create access. My ability to build and retain the skills isn’t less because I didn’t have them to begin with pre-AI for coding. I can certainly say I’ve developed judgment. Knowing when the input is right, when to push back, when to rewrite. Maybe that’s the skill agentic coding builds for non-engineers?

The part that resonates with me most is the timing and luck acknowledgement. I built a solo Saas product over the past few months using Calude Code as my development partner. Total cost $600. Launching in 3 days. The tools available now means the barrier to building something has basically collapsed. A weekend in a dorm room in 2020, a few months with AI coding in 2026. Same DNA... find the gap, build the thing and ship it.

If you don't mind sharing, what's your product? I found that ideas are a dime a dozen, but finding the people who will pay for it is the hard part. AI will more than happily suggest terrible ideas no one would pay for.

It’s call You Have Time. It’s an anti procrastination app that connects to your Google calendar, finds your real free time, and shows you how long you’ve been avoiding each task. The idea came from years of observing people avoiding things they know they need to get done. AI just handled the coding.

You’re correct that people risk shipping pointless ideas when they let AI drive. But when you’re in the driver’s seat… you have the idea, the vision, you know your customer… AI is a tool in your toolkit.

Launching tomorrow for free at app.youhavetime.co. Paid tiers open in a few months. Tomorrow I find out how the idea resonates.

Congrats on the launch! Best of luck. Seems like a neat idea

I'm building a productivity app right now that lives entirely on the web right now because I can't justify native development costs yet. The daily nudge (i.e., you have 47 free minutes, and this task has been sitting for 14 days) is the core retention metric. This only works as a push notification; emails get ignored. The web app sends an email. V2 goes native specifically for this reason.

The article's point about leading with the fact rather than the brand point is useful. The notification payload I'm designing already leads with the concrete numbers.

AI as a tool with human direction is genuinely useful. AI as a replacement for human judgement... scary. It's a slippery slope. Forwarding screenshots without reading them, copying and pasting responses without understanding them, etc. is what you're describing. I've spent months building a product with Claude Code. Claude wrote the code. I made every product and business decision. The output is mine; the judgment was mine. The problem isn't AI. It's using AI as a substitute for thinking rather than a tool in your toolbox.