AI has changed the economics of building software. Founders, product managers, and anyone with an idea can now turn concepts into working products in days instead of months.
That is incredible. It is also creating a new problem: we are getting better at building whatever could be built while losing sight of what should be built.
The pace of production is starting to outpace the pace of adoption. We can ship new features faster than people can understand them, trust them, or fit them into the way they already work.
The job was never just to build.
I see founders and product managers spending more of their time interacting with tools like Claude and Codex, generating feature after feature. The ability to do that is valuable. It can help teams move from idea to evidence much faster.
But there is a risk in confusing the ability to act like an engineer with the responsibility of product management.
Product management is not primarily about producing features. It is about figuring out which problem is worth solving, for whom, and why now. It is about understanding a user's job-to-be-done, the value they are looking for, the economics behind the product, and what they are realistically willing to adopt.
Those questions do not disappear because software is easier to create. They become more important.
More output does not mean more value.
One carefully considered and thoughtfully executed product will usually create more value than ten hastily produced pieces of vibe-coded slop.
The answer is not to slow down for the sake of slowing down. It is to spend the time we save on building more wisely. Use AI to explore, prototype, test, and learn. Do not use it as an excuse to skip the thinking that gives a product a reason to exist.
Users are still real people. They have limited attention, existing habits, competing priorities, and valid reasons to resist change. No tool can magically remove those realities.
Product management is about people. AI may change how quickly we can build, but it does not change what makes a product worth building.