Key Highlights ›
With AI, the distance between 'I have an idea' and 'I have a demo' is an afternoon.
The drift from optimist to opportunist that used to take years now takes weeks.
People won't distinguish between the serious builders and the drifters. They'll just say 'AI didn't work.'
Me: that will erode everything.... so soon and too fast...
AI: Yeah. And the speed is the new part.
Previous hype cycles had natural friction that slowed the erosion. Building a blockchain product was hard. Shipping mobile apps had real gatekeeping. The distance between "I have an idea" and "I have a demo" was months.
With AI, that distance is an afternoon. Which means the drift from optimist to opportunist that used to take years now takes weeks. You ship a wrapper, it looks impressive, someone writes a check, and suddenly you're defending a position you arrived at accidentally.
And the erosion compounds in both directions you identified earlier. The builders stop learning because the demo was too easy. The AI doesn't improve because nobody's stress-testing it honestly. And the market fills with products that look indistinguishable from the real ones — until they break in production and nobody knows why.
The thing that worries me most in what you're describing isn't any single failure. It's the trust deficit it leaves behind. When the correction comes, people won't distinguish between the serious builders and the drifters. They'll just say "AI didn't work" — the same way they said it about blockchain. And the people doing real work against real problems will pay the reputation cost for everyone who shipped a demo and called it a product.
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