AI Can Build the Feature. That Doesn’t Mean It Can Build the Product.

There’s another part of the “we’ll just build it with Claude” conversation that feels pretty familiar.

We’ve seen versions of this before.

When tools like Outreach and Salesloft came along, they were built around a pretty specific problem.

They went deep on it.

Then the bigger platforms looked at what they were doing and said, essentially:

“We can add that.”

And they did.

Sometimes by building it themselves. Sometimes by acquiring something and bolting it on.

But adding the features isn’t always the same as recreating the product.

Because a good SaaS product isn’t just a pile of features.

It’s years of decisions about workflows, edge cases, integrations, permissions, reporting, onboarding, support and all the weird stuff customers eventually ask it to do.

Claude changes the equation because it makes building software dramatically easier.

That matters.

A company can probably recreate a surprising amount of visible functionality now without hiring a huge engineering team.

But there’s a big difference between:

“Can we build something that does this?”

and

“Do we understand everything this product has learned to do over the last 10 years?”

Sometimes the answer will absolutely be: build it.

But I think a lot of companies are going to find out that the code was the easy part.

Understanding the problem deeply enough was the hard part.