AI Makes Building Cheap. Our Product Architectures Still Assume It’s Expensive.

One of the strange things happening right now is that people can suddenly build surprisingly useful software with AI. Founders are building internal tools with Claude. PMs are prototyping workflows in a weekend. Small teams are generating working features faster than organizations can even review them. And it raises a very reasonable question: If useful software can now be built so quickly, why do mature product teams still move so slowly? Part of the answer is that large products are not isolated systems. In a small prototype, a feature mostly needs to work by itself.