Building With No Constraints
With AI, nothing has to ship.
I recently built a fairly complex, fully functional web product using nothing but Claude Fable. The product is well tested, secure, and highly polished. It is also not an MVP. It is feature rich. And it took me only 3 weeks of my time and about $1,500.
To build this in a previous life, it would have taken me about 6 months, a few million dollars of venture capital, and a small team. And most importantly, what we would have built would have definitely been an MVP.
What does it mean to build with AI, without any constraints? I’m learning. Practically, it means prompting Claude from my phone over a remote session, as I’m walking to my car after meeting a friend for coffee, asking it to build a brand new feature, just because I can. It means letting Claude handle permission decisions on its own and just build. It feels really powerful. Like I’m a product manager again, except the team I’m working with wants to build whatever I want to build, immediately, instantly, and within hours, not weeks.
And while it feels like I’m expressing maximum creativity, adding one crazy feature after another, it also feels like I’m not being creative at all. As the old saying goes, constraints breed creativity. When you have a small team, limited time and capital, and real milestones to achieve, you have to pick and choose what you do. And sometimes, that results in something magical. Someone recently asked me when I did the best work of my career, and I immediately answered that it was when my startup was 3 months away from running out of cash.
I haven’t shipped the product. I don’t know when (or if) I ever will. There’s a part of me that believes it will perform phenomenally well when I finally do, given just how complete it feels.
But I also wonder if the lack of constraints is the reason this thing hasn’t shipped yet. When anything can be built at any moment, nothing ever has to ship. There’s no deadline, no burn rate, no team waiting on my decision. The constraint I’m missing isn’t capital or people. It might just be a simple deadline. And that’s the one thing I can’t get AI to build for me.
I guess I’ll find out what all this abundance actually got me when I ship it. If I ship it.