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.
Top comments (1)
This is probably the most accurate take on AI-assisted development right now. AI removed a huge amount of coding friction, but it also exposed how many products were surviving purely because implementation used to be slow enough to force people to think first 😅
The real bottleneck today isn’t generating code — it’s generating clarity.
A lot of “vibe-coded” apps feel like a committee of autocomplete suggestions fighting for dominance inside the same repo.
I really like the focus on MVP boundaries and structured feature planning before prompting, because good architecture still matters even if the code arrives at light speed.
The “what should NOT be built” point is especially underrated — product discipline scales better than token context windows ever will.
Launchchair’s spec-splicing approach sounds interesting too, especially if it helps agents stay scoped instead of randomly rewriting half the app because you asked for a dark mode toggle 😂