Building real products in the AI era

We need to rethink how we build apps. AI can spin up a website or an app in minutes now, but it's still bad at building entire systems. The moment you have many complex features and different systems talking to each other, it falls apart. Spec-driven development tries to fix this, and it helps, but it still can't architect a whole system on its own. I built skills to push it further: spec.md, ship.md, and vibe.md (https://skills.amajor.ai). They get the job done, but you still have to scope each feature to the right size or the AI leaves gaps. I speced out the first version of Ryu as 170 GitHub issues and it built itself in a week. Impressive, but it still couldn't hold the big picture of a project that size, and that's the real gap right now.

A cool demo isn't a business

Building a cool demo gets you eyes, not retention. The startups people call cool rarely stick around, they're hackathon-worthy and nothing more. The ones that last solve a real problem, sometimes a boring one with no wow factor, because nobody wakes up wanting a cool product. They wake up wanting their problem gone. So you either solve a hard problem nobody wants to touch, or you solve an existing one better than what's already out there. If there's no competitor in your space, that's not a green field, it's zero validation. Competition isn't a red flag, it's proof the problem is worth solving. But solving a good problem still isn't enough, you have to ask whether it's even feasible as a business. A good idea is a solution people are actually willing to pay for. Solve a real problem nobody will pay to fix and all you have is a hobby. It's like opening a restaurant: great food isn't enough, you need a line of hungry people outside the door.

Timing is everything

Apple Intelligence failed two years ago. The same vision works today. The only thing that changed was timing. Back then it was the first time Apple overpromised a feature they probably didn't even know was feasible. The demo felt magical, but the personal AI assistant concept and on-device models were still weak. Fast forward to the agentic era and most of what they showed at WWDC 2026 is actually feasible. Siri AI works today because of all the breakthroughs that got us here.

Most people still don't know how to use AI

And yet most people still think they don't need to learn AI while the whole landscape shifts right in front of them. All this cool tech already exists and almost nobody knows how to use it, only developers. Most people are still just ChatGPT, search, and deep research, that's it. Learning how to use AI and knowing its limits, what it can and can't do, puts you one step ahead of everyone else. When Photoshop gives you a bad output, you blame the artist, not Photoshop. AI is the same: it's just a tool, and the slop comes from the person holding it.

What people actually pay for

People generally pay for:

Stability became an illusion a long time ago. Jobs are no longer stable. Building as a founder and your own company is the real stability today. One where you control your future, not waiting for miracles to happen and your fate controlled by otWhen I applied for Ryu I didn't even have a product. When I went looking for customers I hadn't built anything. You don't wait until it's safe, you start. That's exactly why I'm building Ryu: to close the gap between what AI can almost do and what people can actually ship. The tech is here. The only question is whether you learn to use it before everyone else does.