AI didn’t make software development cheap. It made bad ideas cheap

A friend of mine has shipped 4 products since March and all built with AI, all launched with the little rocket emoji and all quietly dead now. All the paying customers from all 4 of those launches… 3, and before anyone thinks I’m bashing on him, I have 2 of these corpses in my own GitHub so no judgment here. What actually changed is the filter... building software used to cost 15 grand or 6 months of your nights and that price forced you to ask the hard question first…. does anyone actually want this? The expense was doing your idea validation for free. AI removed the cost and the question quietly left with it. So now ideas that would have died in a notebook get built and building was never the hard part anyway. The hard part starts after…. the bug at 2am, the refund email, the one user whose data you’re now responsible for and the update that breaks logins. AI gave every one of you a way to creation. However, responsibility wasn’t there in the package. When your thing fails, the AI doesn’t answer the angry customer. That’s your job. That’s the real trap. It got cheap to make something that looks like software. A landing page with a login screen, and a demo which seems to work when you are looking at it... The part where it IS software, where it runs next month and someone supports it and costs exactly what it always did(Same energy as January gym signups tbh) Joining is easy but showing up stayed hard. I’m not saying to stop building. Build faster and its genuinely great. I'm just suggesting to do the annoying part first…. talk to 5 people who actually have the problem. If no one cares then you saved yourself a weekend. If they do, build it and then commit to being the guy who answers the emails.