Building isn't the bottleneck anymore
....was it really ever??...
Last year, I watched a founder spend six months coding a “revolutionary” thing-ama-jig [real product name redacted to protect the well-intended].
Beautiful interface. Flawless database design. Test coverage that would make enterprise teams jealous.
Zero customers on launch day.
They’d built the wrong thing, perfectly.
This happens constantly now. AI lets us code faster than ever, but we’re still solving the wrong problems at light speed.
I’ve been there. In my corporate days, we’d spend months architecting systems for requirements we never validated. The technical execution was flawless. The market timing was catastrophic.
Here’s what changed with AI coding:
Building went from 80% of the work to maybe 30%. The real challenge shifted upstream — to the messy, human work of understanding what people actually want.
When I can generate a working prototype in days instead of months, the expensive mistake isn’t writing bad code. It’s writing good code for bad ideas.
The new discipline is validation first.
Before a single line gets written, you need answers:
Who has this exact problem?
How are they solving it badly today?
What would make them switch?
How much would they pay to fix it?
This isn’t just “talk to customers.” It’s systematic discovery with frameworks that catch blind spots before they become expensive builds.
I learned this the hard way with my over-engineered testing suite story. Perfect technical execution, zero market validation. Classic founder trap.
The solopreneur advantage is real now.
You don’t need a team to build anymore. You need clarity about what to build.
The founders winning today aren’t the best coders. They’re the best validators — people who can spot real problems, understand solutions, and structure validation before anyone writes code.
Because when building takes days instead of months, getting the idea right becomes everything.
What’s the best validation framework you’ve used before writing code?