AI Is Changing How Startups Build Products

For most of the last decade the bottleneck in software was construction. Building took time, so roadmaps were long and bets were few.\n\nThat constraint has moved. Teams now prototype in an afternoon what used to take a quarter, which means the scarce resource is judgement.\n\n## Discovery collapses\n\nWhen a working prototype costs almost nothing, research stops being a separate phase. Teams test with real interfaces instead of descriptions.\n\n## The new bottleneck\n\nWhat slows teams down now is deciding which of ten plausible products is worth maintaining for five years.