AI’s “Just Ship It” Problem

Throwing spaghetti 10× faster doesn’t make the wall bigger—or your customers happier.

1. AI’s super-power is tiny on big problems

A friend of mine who manages a large engineering team at a leading demand-generation platform recently polled his 75+ developers on a key question: 'How much faster are you with Copilot?' Their answer:

• Easy tasks (copy-paste code) → +60 %

• Huge codebases (10 000+ files) → +5 %

• Average real app → +20 %

This is exactly the same for product managers (although no one interviews PMs, literally) : AI writes button copy in 2 sec. But AI can’t decide which button your enterprise customers actually need.

2. Faster shipping = faster garbage

At TrueQC (2020) we shipped 5–10 times per day. Result?

• 47 micro-tools, each with 2 bugs

• Users: “Why is the UI different every week?”

• Engineers: 80 % of sprint fixing yesterday’s “ship”

AI just turns 1-week junk into 1-day junk.

3. The TWO bottlenecks AI can’t touch

   1. Good ideas: AI can list 50 shades of blue. It can’t tell you that enterprise wants red because of their brand guidelines.

   2. Waiting for proof. Even with a million monthly users:

      1. Homepage headline test → significant in 4 hours

      2. Pricing-table for $10k deals → significant in 6 weeks

AI can’t make humans click faster.

4. The “sales-will-tell-me” myth

   1. Small startup (0–1 M ARR): Ship → watch revenue graph → repeat. Works!

   2. Scale-up (50 M ARR):

      1. One killer feature = +4 % revenue.

      2. Normal sales noise = ±8 %.

      3. →You will NEVER see the signal without proper A/B tests.

5. 75 % of features hurt the product

Harvard study: even the smartest teams ship flops 3 out of 4 times. Skip validation → quietly make your app worse → churn → death spiral.

6. What AI actually fixes today

   1. Auto-complete SQL

   2. Turn bullet points into email

   3. Find the 3 typos in 100 lines

7. What still needs YOU

   1. Friday 3-hour customer call

   2. “What hurts most?” whiteboard

   3. Saying “NO” to the CEO’s pet idea

So here is my 3-Step Playbook for 2025

1. Give every PM + dev an AI pair-programmer → 20 % more tickets done.

2. Keep the weekly customer interview → 0 % compromise.

3. Run every feature 2 weeks in a 5 % ring → measure, then ship wide.

So all in all,

AI gives you a jet engine for the easy 20 % of work. The hard 80 %—big ideas and real user proof—still runs on human speed. Shipping 10× more half-baked buttons just creates 10× more tech debt. 75 % of ideas flop; test or die. Keep calm, keep talking to customers, and use AI as a turbo-intern, not a magic CEO.