AI made building SaaS easier but somehow people are shipping worse products

Jacob Counsell — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:40:55 +0000

I’ve been building apps traditionally for years and spent the last year heavily using AI tools to speed things up.

One thing that’s become really obvious is most people are treating ChatGPT/Claude/Cursor like a magic wand instead of like collaborators that still need direction.

You can build UI fast now.
You can scaffold features fast.
You can debug faster than ever.

But most AI-built SaaS apps still end up feeling messy as hell because nobody spends time thinking through:

what the actual MVP is
what should NOT be built
what makes the product different
whether the feature set even makes sense together

So people end up in this cycle where the app technically “works” but every new feature breaks something else because the project has no structure underneath it.

The coding barely even feels like the bottleneck anymore. Product clarity is.

The biggest improvement I’ve had recently was spending way more time on product direction, feature scope, and structured build planning before touching prompts.

The AI output got dramatically better almost immediately.

This is why I started building https://www.launchchair.io/ for myself. I got tired of rebuilding fragile AI projects and wanted a workflow that handled MVP planning, feature scoping, and build structure before the vibe coding even starts.

The core of it is a dynamic prompt engine + spec splicing algorithm that writes scoped feature-by-feature prompts for you using your product spec, acceptance criteria, architecture context, and build progress so you can create much more structured MVPs incredibly fast without manually managing giant context windows yourself. And best of all you never need to write a single prompt yourself! It even has an agent API / MCP so you could use claw or an agent harness to build apps for you while you sleep.

DEV Community: Jacob Counsell

AI made building SaaS easier but somehow people are shipping worse products