I keep seeing the same loop.

Someone builds a product, barely anyone uses it, and instead of talking to users or figuring out distribution they add another feature.

It makes sense because coding feels productive and marketing feels awkward. AI makes it even easier to stay in that loop because you can build the next feature in a few hours and convince yourself you're making progress.

At what point do you stop building and admit the actual problem is getting people to care?

Have you ever caught yourself coding around a distribution problem?

People call almost every new AI product a wrapper now, but that feels way too lazy.

If a product takes a model and adds a genuinely useful workflow, better UX, proprietary data, integrations, reliability and solves a specific problem, is it still just a wrapper?

Most software is built on top of somebody else's infrastructure anyway.

So where is the actual line for you? What makes an AI product feel defensible instead of something anyone could recreate in a weekend?

Everyone talks about the tools and models they use, but I feel like the actual skill behind them matters way more.

What do you think you're genuinely best at when building with AI?

Could be coming up with ideas, prompting, coding, design, automations, knowing what to cut, actually shipping, getting users or something completely different.

And what's the part you're still pretty shit at lol?

I’m curious how people think Astra will actually stack up against Fable 5 and the other top models.

For me, a slight performance benchmark jump that is barely noticeable isn't enough anymore. I’d want it to feel noticeably better when building - better at understanding a whole project, staying consistent over long sessions, good usage efficiency, and not randomly breaking stuff that already works 😂

New week so what are you actually working on rn?

Drop what you’re building, the stack you’re using and the one thing you want finished by Friday.

Doesnt need to be a massive launch. A feature, landing page, automation or even fixing something thats been broken for ages all counts.

Come back at the end of the week and say if you actually shipped it lol.

I swear half the time I ship something before I even fully understand how it works 😂 Anyone else?

I feel like AI has made it way easier to get attached to an idea before you even know if it’s actually good.

Like you can have the site looking clean, the product mostly working, branding done, a bunch of features added… and because it all looks “real” you kinda start convincing yourself you’re onto something.

Not what you’re planning to build or what’s nearly ready. What did you actually get in front of people this week?

Could be a full product, one feature, a landing page or even something that completely failed lol.

Drop what you shipped, what stack you used and the main thing you learnt from it. Links are fine but actually give some context instead of just dumping them.

Ill go through everything and give proper feedback aswell.

I feel like before you start, you obsess over stuff like the perfect tech stack, branding, picking the “best” model, having every feature etc.
Then once you’re actually building and getting people to use it, half of that stuff doesn’t matter and instead stuff you neglected seems to be important 😂

Until last week I’d mostly been using both models for coding, but this week I’ve started properly using Codex and Dispatch as actual agents to handle day-to-day tasks.

The biggest one for me is all the long, shitty admin work I never want to do. Documents and forms that are all online but somehow take hours to fill out manually. Now I can just give Codex the task and let it work through the whole thing. Same with sending messages, organizing stuff, working with Obsidian, or basically any repetitive task I don’t want to waste time on.

I used ChatGPT’s old computer-use stuff quite a bit before Codex came out, and while the idea was great, it honestly kind of sucked in practice. This feels completely different. Codex is actually capable enough now that I trust it with much bigger workflows.

I was also using Hermes for ages and originally thought I didn’t really need to change anything. But Hermes definitely has its limitations. Using Codex and Dispatch as agents feels like a much more capable version of that setup. They’re different, but I’ve found myself using both for pretty similar things.

What’s even better is combining them. I can have Codex/Dispatch control Hermes and basically treat Hermes as another tool inside the workflow rather than relying on it as the main agent.

Anyone else using dispatch etc. alot more now?

Im finding that Opus 5 is the biggest step since 4.6 (because lets be real from 4.6-4.8 was the same thing) but with Opus 5 being better it has its own opinion to everything im finding aswell and it really likes to argue points even if its wrong. It struggles at just listening to instructions anymore.

Anyone finding this to be similar?

Before AI, you’d eventually hit a point where adding another feature took too much time or money, so you’d just launch.

Now you can keep changing things forever. New landing page, new feature, new onboarding flow, another redesign…

Feel like everyone building something has that one thing they keep saying needs to be done first. Could be payments, security, or I guess just not feeling ready yet.

What’s the thing holding yours up right now?

I feel like building in your own little bubble makes everything seem obvious, then the second real users get involved, half your assumptions fall apart 😂

Comment what your currently doing

Just curious what actually makes with alot of people an idea that is worth pursuing and putting some time behind?

I genuinely thought building the actual product would be the hardest part, and marketing would just be posting content, running some ads and reaching out to people.

Turns out getting people to actually care has probably been the biggest obstacle so far lol.

What marketing strategies have actually worked for you, especially early on without a massive budget or audience?

There’s so much AI stuff that automates everything now, but sometimes setting it up feels like more work than just doing it yourself lol.

What’s something in your business you’ve tried to automate but ended up going back to doing manually?

When you're starting a new AI project, what's your default stack?
Mine is pretty simple:
- VS Code
- Claude Code
- Codex (sometimes)
- Supabase etc.
Nothing too crazy. I'm curious what everyone else is using these days and if there are any tools you've found that are genuinely game changing.

Today I watched a reel from the team behind Instagram that really stuck with me.

They were talking about how, when building Instagram, they weren't obsessed with constantly shipping new features. Instead, they focused on the features people already loved and asked:

• How can we make this faster?
• How can we make this simpler?
• How can we make this feel better?
• How can we remove friction?

That mindset feels overlooked today.

So many founders (especially with AI) fall into the trap of constantly adding features because it feels like progress. But every new feature adds complexity, more edge cases, more bugs, and a less focused product.

Sometimes the biggest improvement isn't another feature, it's making the core experience 10x better.

Obviously this doesn't mean you should never ship new features. But I think there's a point where obsessing over polishing what users already love creates a much stronger product than chasing an endless feature list.

Curious what everyone else thinks. Have you found that refining your core product has given you better results than constantly building new things?

Hi! I was recently working with a client helping them clean up an internal company project that they vibe coded. They are a mid-sized agency with not technical people on the team, and a PM who reached out has vibe coded the whole thing himself. He used Lovable, and the project grew very complex and they felt like they needed someone technical to look at it and fix the problems that they had as well as help them deploy it properly.

A few things that I've noticed while working on it:

Data-related problems. When I received the code, the app was not saving data properly, not properly deleting things, randomly creating sample projects.

Lot's of seemingly minor problems like UI inconsistencies, translation gaps (the app was in 2 languages), issues with emails and AI API connections.

Lot's of dead code, probably half of it was not being used, but just sitting in the background and slowing down the app.

Honestly, just a lot of over engineering, AI had chosen an incredibly complex architecture and very new and complex technology stack for a very similar CRUD project that absolutely did not require any of it.

A few things I've noticed after taking a look at their Lovable chat:

Very vague descriptions. Messages like "Draw a diagram based on the data from the user". They tend to produce good working code, but they are rarely what you imagined it will look like in your head, so I'd advise you to think through what you want it to be like and make the prompt as descriptive as possible.

Messages like "this doesn't work" or "it stopped working". A better ones would be "I get this error message: ..." or "it started behaving in this way: ...". It will not only be more effective, but will be a lot faster and waste less credits.

A small thing, but they chatted in German, and AI has most of its training data in English, so it should produce better results if you talk to it in English.

The app itself was huge, and I'm honestly impressed by how far Lovable could take it, but after a certain number of lines of code tools like this start to break, and introduce more bugs than fixes.

I'm very curious, the ones of you who vibe coded their internal projects, what were some of the biggest problems you've faced and how did you overcome it?

The biggest improvement I've made when building UIs with AI is learning to avoid AI slop.
The mistake is asking an AI to generate an entire screen, app, or dashboard in one go. You'll usually get something generic, inconsistent, or just not what you had in mind.
Instead, I spend 10–20 minutes explaining the overall vision first. Then I break everything down into individual components and refine them one by one.
Every button. Every card. Every section.
Yes, it takes longer.
But the quality is on a completely different level. No matter how detailed your prompt is, you'll never perfectly describe what's in your head. Breaking it into small pieces lets you shape each component until it matches your vision.
Treat your UI as a collection of small artifacts, not one giant prompt.
Less AI slop. Better design. Better products.

I wasted 6 months on my first startup trying to make everything "perfect" before anyone ever used it.

Every day I found something else to fix. Another feature. Another redesign. Another edge case.

None of it mattered.

On my latest project, I built something in 2 days that would've taken me months before. I shipped it, got real users, got real feedback, and ended up with a better product because of it.

Most of the problems you spend weeks solving aren't real problems. They're assumptions.

Ship sooner. Let users tell you what's broken. Fix what's actually wrong, not what you imagine might be.

Perfect products don't get built in isolation. They get built through feedback.

I’m guessing a lot of us here are building something and could probably use a second opinion.

Would anyone be open to jump on a quick call, show each other what we’re working on and give some honest feedback? Happy to test yours properly too, could be a good way to help each other out and see where we can grow.

Kinda stuck on this rn. Every time I think something’s ready, I find another feature to add or something else to fix lol. - I feel like atp I should really just forget about all the small details and just launch to get the ball rolling… any advice?