Even With AI, You'll Still Ship Garbage
Lovable just put out a very celebratory data report called A First Look at the Build Economy: 50 million projects built on the platform, 720 million monthly visits, 80% of creators with no technical background, 35% already making money. The official framing: this is the dawn of a whole new economy — the Build Economy.
Inspiring stuff. Then I did the one piece of division the report didn’t do: 720 million divided by 50 million — the average project gets visited 14 times a month.
Fourteen. You open your own project to tinker with it more than 14 times a month. And since traffic is inevitably concentrated in a tiny handful of winners at the top, that average means the real visit count for the vast majority of projects rounds to zero. Out of 50 million projects, most are things that nobody — not one person — needs.
Bluntly: garbage. And I’m not saying that from on high — I’ve shipped things nobody visited too, things that sank the moment they launched. This one cuts me first.
Garbage isn’t built. It’s decided.
A product usually becomes garbage before the first line of code exists: either nobody actually has the problem, or the people who have it already have a solution they like better, or you went start to finish without talking to a single real user. All of that happens before the “building” part.
It used to be that projects like these mostly died en route. The technical barrier was garbage’s natural brake — you couldn’t finish it, so nobody saw it, and the world stayed quiet. AI ripped the brake out. Hand it a half-baked requirement and it takes the order, no questions asked — and builds it beautifully. Someone unwilling to think things through used to squeeze out one piece of garbage a year. Now they can ship five a month.
Garbage has always been manufactured by garbage decisions. AI didn’t change that causal chain. It just compressed the distance from “decision” to “finished product” from six months down to an afternoon.
”I can build it” no longer filters anything
Yesterday Anthropic released Fable 5 and the capability ceiling went up another notch. Karpathy said in his Sequoia talk a while back that the floor is rising — everyone can vibe code anything. He’s right, but there’s a corollary nobody likes to say out loud: when everyone can build it, “I built it” stops being an achievement in any meaningful sense.
Shipping a working product used to prove, at minimum, that you could execute — and that alone filtered out most people. Now it proves nothing. Execution is rented. Twenty dollars a month.
The filter didn’t disappear. It moved — onto the questions AI can’t answer for you. Whose problem is this? How are they coping right now? How do you know they’d switch? Not one of those three questions requires writing code. And for most of those 50 million projects, not one of them was ever answered.
The uncomfortable part
The mechanism that produces garbage is actually brutally honest: you won’t go talk to ten real users because you’re afraid of hearing “I don’t need this.” You skip validation and start building, because the high of making something feels so much better than the sting of being rejected.
AI didn’t change human nature here. It leans into it. You want to dodge validation? It hands you a smoother dodge — within 24 hours, the warm glow of “I’m building a product” has buried the thought “maybe nobody wants this” so deep you’ll never hear it again. A productivity tool, and simultaneously the best avoidance tool ever made.
What about the 35% who are making money? There’s a line in the report worth a second look: the strongest predictor of what people build is what they were already doing and already knew. Translation: the people earning aren’t winning because they know how to use AI. They’re winning because they walked in carrying problems they’d marinated in out in the real world. AI just means they no longer have to wait around for a cofounder who can code.
The verdict
The first skill to depreciate in the AI era is execution. The second is using execution to cover for not thinking — that move used to work. “At least I built it” always sounded like an achievement. Not anymore.
The dividing line in product work is shifting from “can you build it” to “do you have the nerve not to”: the nerve to answer the uncomfortable questions before you start, the nerve to kill an idea with your own hands before it becomes one of 50 million.
Once the cost of making things approaches zero, there’s only one thing you’re actually spending: your own judgment. The opposite of garbage was never a masterpiece. It’s restraint.
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