Excellent post from Ben Werdmuller about the dramatic shift that has impacted the calculus for startups and founders.

Enter AI. Almost without warning, AI-enabled tools dramatically expanded what a resource-strapped team can create. It’s a genuine sea change. The more founders and senior engineers I speak to who are actively using these tools, the more stories I hear about accelerated development. People are building smaller tools that would have taken many sprints in less than a day; founders are building entire startups that might have taken six months in less than one.

Ben does point out that there is more to consider than the up-front investment of time and energy required to make an idea a sustainable and successful product. There’s a critical human factor: giving a shit about what you create.

In a world where AI and modern tooling make it dangerously easy to spin up new software, our ultimate constraint is no longer our ability to type code. It’s our capacity to care for the things we bring into the world. Saying "no" to a project with a massive, hidden maintenance burden isn't a failure of imagination; it is how you protect your team’s time so they can focus on the journalism, the community, or the core mission that actually makes your organization special.

You don’t just need to build the dog, you also need to walk it, feed it, and give it the attention it deserves.