A few years ago, the biggest challenge for building a software product was usually technical skills.

Today, with AI coding tools, someone with limited coding experience can create a functional MVP in days or even hours.

But I m starting to wonder if the bottleneck has simply moved somewhere else.

Building is becoming easier, but:

My dashboard is beautiful. Signups, activation, weekly actives, retention curves, the whole thing. And I've started to suspect it's telling me a story I want to hear.

I chose the definitions. I chose the date range. I chose which cohorts to compare. Every one of those choices was defensible on its own, and together they might add up to a portrait of a business that doesn't exist.

I m not a designer. I build landing pages by telling an AI what aesthetic I want and letting it generate the interface. It s magical, but it has one hidden trap: I can t tell if the layout actually makes sense to a user.

A few weeks ago, I had AI design a sign-up flow for a mini project. It looked modern, sleek, and worked smoothly on my laptop. A week later, when I watched a friend try to use it on mobile, they couldn't even find the submit button because the contrast was terrible and it was buried off-screen. Nothing looked "broken" to me at first glance, so I almost missed it.

It made me wonder if non-designers are launching products too easily just because the preview looks pretty.

How do you test UI/UX when you can t evaluate the design code or principles? Do you run blind user tests, ask the AI for accessibility audits, or just hope visitors figure it out? And has a "perfect" AI design ever failed you in the real world?

I built my app in months. Marketing has been the hard part. There's no "vibe marketing" yet, but a few tools made specific jobs much easier. Here's what I used, task by task:

1. Launch video ElevenLabs

• What I used: its image, video, voice, and music tools. I made one reference image of my character and generated every scene from it, so his face stayed the same. The voices use Eleven v3 dialogue with tags like [tired] and [pause].

• Tip: avoid the AI agent editor. It used about 3x the credits I expected. Generating each piece yourself is cheaper.

2. Editing, captions and motion graphics Claude

I spent a day trying to fix something and could not. Nothing worked. I tried everything I could think of.

Then I remembered I had deleted a block of code months ago because I thought it was useless. It was not useless. It was doing something I did not understand, and I had removed it because it was old and messy.