Everything I Knew About Building Products Was Wrong

19 Feb, 2026

These last few months I’ve had to toss out most of my pre-AI product intuitions.

Boxing

Building products before felt like boxing.

There was a certain degree of chaos, to be sure. But at least you knew it’d be 1v1 with someone in your own weight class.

You got to feel the rhythm of your opponent, study their every movement, and if they surprised you, you had time in between rounds to reset.

Boxing is technical and disciplined.

The dominant PM school of thought was about simplifying: do one thing better than the incumbents and you’ll win.

You could close your eyes and visualise the precise path your user takes through your app. Wireframes were sequenced in those days.

UX innovation looked like drilling new patterns into your users: swipe to unlock, pull to refresh, etc.

Feature requests got filed and triaged later. Weekly shipping cadence was best-in-class.

Product ownership meant constraining complexity, saying no, and enforcing strong opinions on how people should use your product.

Rugby

By contrast, building AI-native products with AI tools feels more like playing schoolboy rugby.

When 30 kids run around the pitch frantically, nothing goes according to plan.

One moment you’re catching a hospital pass and getting tackled by someone twice your size. The next you’re on a breakaway, goose stepping your way to the try line.

This mode of product dev runs completely counter to conventional wisdom. Now you actually can “boil the ocean” (h/t @garrytan):

The killer apps look like blank canvases. They built a Von Neumann universal constructor (h/t @eshear) and let users show them how it’s useful.

You feel more like a PM at Mitsubishi than at Apple. Products are sprawling: thousands of integrations, MCPs, and skills, and dangerous (“here’s a command that’s a bona fide superpower, but don’t run it bc it could nuke your whole machine”). Every app wants permission to your screen, keystrokes, and microphone.

The gap between user and creator is converging. PRs hit at the speed of inference.

Everything is synchronous because there’s no longer any reason to wait on another person’s work.

You’re constantly evaluating and re-evaluating vendors while simultaneously thinking, “couldn’t we just build this ourselves over a weekend?”

The product owner is everyone and nobody is getting any sleep.

tl;dr this new world order can be hard to keep up with, but I like playing rugby :)