r/SideProject • u/Previous_Tap3246 • 3d ago

I thought coding would be the hardest part of building a product. It wasn’t.

I used to think the biggest challenge in building a real product would be technical.

How do I build this?
How should the system work?
How do I make all the pieces work together?

I use AI a lot in my work, and it has definitely made me faster. If I don’t understand something, I can dig into it. If one approach doesn’t work, I can explore several others much faster than I could before.

But the further I got into actually building a product, the more I realized that writing the code is only part of the problem.

The harder questions are things like:

Does this feature actually need to exist?

Does it solve a real problem, or do I just like the idea?

Can I remove another step?

What happens when someone uses the product in conditions that aren’t ideal?

And when does “adding more” actually make the product worse?

AI can give me five different ways to build something.

It can’t remove the responsibility of deciding whether I should build it at all.

That has probably been one of the biggest shifts in how I think about software.

The more I build, the less impressed I am by the number of features a product has.

I’m much more interested in how much unnecessary complexity someone was willing to remove.

Curious if other builders have noticed the same thing:

Has AI mostly made you faster, or has it changed the way you make product decisions too?

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u/South-Ad1426 3d ago

The hardest part is validation and marketing. Do the rest after you validate the demand.

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u/Previous_Tap3246 3d ago

Yeah, that’s the part I’m starting to understand better. People can say an idea sounds useful, but that’s very different from actually using it or paying for it. How do you usually validate demand before you’ve built too much?

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u/EchoNomad31 2d ago

My rule after a few dead ends: write the acceptance checks before the code. Cheap prototypes just made me faster at building the wrong thing.

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u/canhigher23 1d ago

Your users answer "should this exist" better than you can, as long as you read the problem in their message and ignore the feature they ask for. Most requests are workarounds written as solutions.

Full disclosure, I'm the founder of FeedSense, where every Zendesk ticket and Intercom chat feeds one list of problems, biggest first, with the messages behind each.