Let’s stop reinventing the wheel

Are we using AI to build the right things faster, or just building for the sake of it?

I haven’t had to code since I was in college. Even then, one of my biggest projects was a team project where I came up with the idea for a collecting game called Masterchef, a pixelated chef chasing spaghetti ingredients while avoiding rocks and random sheep (don’t ask).

My teammates did most of the coding. To be fair, I had little interest in it.

What I did do was sit nearby while they debugged. They’d explain the issue, walk me through the logic, and I’d suggest alternative approaches without ever looking at the code itself. I stayed distant, but I did care about what we were trying to build.

One of them, still one of my best friends, kept pushing me to get more involved. She was convinced that if I could already help without touching the code, I’d be even better if I actually engaged with it.

I didn’t buy it then. For me, the reason I could come up with fixes was because I was able to look at their logic without bias. But in hindsight, she wasn’t wrong.

Back then, I didn’t know what a product manager was. But I was already orbiting that role, focused on outcomes, logic, and user experience rather than implementation itself. Eventually, I found my way there properly.

Fast forward to today.

We’re all watching AI reshape how things get built. You can go from idea to something that works in an afternoon.

That’s intoxicating.

For the first time, we all feel like builders.

But when execution stops being the biggest constraint, we realize that making the right call, deciding what to build and how, has been the biggest bottleneck in product development.

What to build, why it matters, who it’s for, and what makes it actually good. That’s the challenge now. It has always been, but now it’s obvious.

When everything becomes easier to build, it’s also easier to confuse making something with making something worthwhile.

We’re no longer blocked by not being able to build by ourselves, but now we’re distracted by the fact that we can build anything. So we do.

And sometimes it feels a bit like DIY crafts, where halfway through you wonder:

“Why am I even doing this? Didn’t someone already make this better?”

I know, the pleasure is in accomplishing it yourself, not necessarily the outcome.

This isn’t new, and you probably already know what this is: the IKEA effect.

We tend to place a higher value on things we partially create ourselves, even if the end result is objectively worse.

It’s the same reason food companies once struggled to sell fully ready baking mixes. In the 1950s, General Mills introduced “just add water” Betty Crocker cake mixes. Convenient, efficient, and a complete failure. Sales were low.

Psychologists like Ernest Dichter found that the process felt too easy. People didn’t feel like they were really baking. So the company made a counterintuitive move: they removed powdered eggs from the mix and asked consumers to add fresh eggs themselves. Suddenly, sales went up.

When you think about it, it wasn’t really a product improvement. It could even be considered a downgrade. But it worked because people felt like they had actually baked something.

We’re doing the same thing now with AI.

What some people call “vibe coding” was supposed to free us from implementation so we could stay focused on outcomes.

But in practice, we’re getting pulled back into execution. Because we can. Because it feels good and is satisfying.

It’s easier than ever to build something simple, and it’s also possible to build more advanced things than ever before.

Anyone can now build a prototype, but very few of us can build something genuinely better than what already exists. That still takes skill. In many ways, more than before.

The best product people I know aren’t detached from execution. On the contrary, they’re fluent enough in it to make better decisions. Not to do everything themselves, but to understand constraints and what “good” actually looks like in practice.

So now, when I sit in front of Claude, I like to remind myself that I’m not there to invent the wheel.

I’m here to decide which wheels are worth building and where they should go. I’m there to put wheels on the right things, things that used to take a lot more people and time to move, faster than before.

In a world where “everyone” can “build”, what matters is knowing what’s actually worth building, and having the taste and judgment to follow through.