Does AI Coding Kill The Lean Startup
Experience from building a new venture with AI coding and Lean Startup.
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There is a big risk of coding with AI that nobody is talking about.
The risk of adding more and more feature without stopping to validate.
It could kill startups, it could kill the journey of great founders.
When I built my first startups, we didn't have AI to code with: no Claude, no Lovable.
We spent two years developing a product without launching, adding features we thought could work.
I learnt it the hard way, that what we thought was not what the customers wanted or found it valuable. I then read the Lean Startup book, and that changed my entire approach to building products and startups.
I shifted my mindset and until this very day I'm the advocate of venture experimentation and scientific discovery.
However, building a new venture called Between Ventures for founders only with AI coding, I found that because it is so easy to add more and more features, I tend to just build and build and build.
AI Coding, if not used responsibly and with experimentation could risk Lean Startup.
The funny thing is that the product I am building allows founders to manage lean startup experiments, do business model canvas AI analysis and get startup experiments recommendations.
So, it's funny how I use my own product to stop the ease and fun of building new features with AI and validate them with my own very creation.
This is what I recommend founders who are building and coding with AI:
1) Be conscious about the slippery slope that AI coding can lead to with developing and just adding new features. Build lean, and define well what you are building first then validate with real customers like the old days.
2) Manage those experiments either with a tool like Between Ventures, or even on an excel sheet, but manage them, reflect and get learnings and then add more features or focus on iterating them first.
3) With AI it's easy to add features, but it's also to remove features - force yourself to remove friction and unused features with a line of prompt.
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