The hardest part of building products with AI isn’t getting it to generate code—it’s that you have to think through a lot of things first.
I recently wrote an article about designing products with AI. But the focus isn’t on “how powerful AI is”—it’s on the decisions AI simply can’t make for you.
For example:
- Who exactly is this feature for?
- Should this flow be simple or flexible?
- Is this problem worth solving right now?
AI can help you quickly generate interfaces, write logic, and come up with solutions. But it doesn’t know who your users are, what matters to you, or which tradeoffs your team is willing to accept.
Those judgments are still yours to make.
In a way, AI makes it more important—not less—to think things through. It executes so quickly that if you’re headed in the wrong direction, you’ll be wrong thoroughly and efficiently.
This is issue 95 of my newsletter. I share a few real moments when I had to make decisions along the way, and I hope they’ll offer some useful perspective if you’re building products with AI.
👉 https://newsletter.bearliu.com/p/designing-a-product-with-ai-the-decisions
I recently wrote an article about designing products with AI. But the focus isn’t on “how powerful AI is”—it’s on the decisions AI simply can’t make for you.
For example:
- Who exactly is this feature for?
- Should this flow be simple or flexible?
- Is this problem worth solving right now?
AI can help you quickly generate interfaces, write logic, and come up with solutions. But it doesn’t know who your users are, what matters to you, or which tradeoffs your team is willing to accept.
Those judgments are still yours to make.
In a way, AI makes it more important—not less—to think things through. It executes so quickly that if you’re headed in the wrong direction, you’ll be wrong thoroughly and efficiently.
This is issue 95 of my newsletter. I share a few real moments when I had to make decisions along the way, and I hope they’ll offer some useful perspective if you’re building products with AI.
👉 https://newsletter.bearliu.com/p/designing-a-product-with-ai-the-decisions