AI Makes It Easy to Build. That Doesn’t Mean We Should Ship More

Dax is spot on.

sent this to the team today

everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible

and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that pic.twitter.com/HlIpY86eJn

— dax (@thdxr) March 10, 2026

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Cambridge Product Management meetup.

During a discussion, someone said their company had given everyone AI tools and that they were now shipping faster than ever.

I told him that it risked being irresponsible.

When it becomes trivial to build things, the bar for what deserves to ship often drops.

Suddenly, every idea can become a feature.

First, bombarding users with constant changes is confusing. Even with feature flags. If every time someone opens your product, something has changed, you risk frustrating them rather than helping them.

Second, features need time to bed in.

You need time to explain them: marketing, emails, videos, blog posts, support docs.

You cannot compress this process.

Like a good wine, some things simply take time. You need an inspect-and-adapt loop that produces insights you can actually base decisions on.

Just because AI makes it easier to build things doesn't mean we should ship more of them.

Everything great comes from delaying gratification.