You know, there’s this pleasant feeling of competence tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and the rest give to you. The one that makes you feel like you can virtually do anything.
You can dream as big as you want with AI.
You can build a website and create an app without knowing how to code properly. Right now, it’s possible to start a business without understanding the industry. I mean, you can create an entire plan for a project you thought of ten minutes ago.
And honestly, all of these feel so amazing and almost fulfilling. But then, amidst the excitement lies a critical problem many do not realize until they are sunken in a pile of unfinished projects.
If there is one thing I will never do, it’s undermine the power artificial intelligence has given us. It has made learning, researching, writing, designing, and building easier than ever. Things that once required a team and probably a month of full research, we can now attempt them sitting alone with a laptop…or a mobile phone.
But that power comes with a bigger problem: a consuming feeling of competence that can blind even the most meticulous person who believes they are in control of their AI companion.
Suddenly, you have lots of projects in progress and nothing in production.
You are building, creating, editing, reviewing, and improving, but you are not putting anything out there.
So, what exactly are you doing?
Go to platforms like Reddit and you will find builders talking about the breakthrough projects they are creating with the help of AI.
But do you know the craziest part?
Many of these so-called creators have been building for months. Like them, I have been building too!
Every week, there is another feature to add, a setup to change, a design to improve, or an issue that must be handled before launch.
So again, what exactly are we doing?
The good thing?
Yes, we have gone from spending hours searching Google, reading one blog post after another to actually creating things.
That should be progress.
Unfortunately, many of us have replaced endless research with an all new endless creation.
There is still no end in sight.
AI Will Always Find Something Wrong
Ask your AI companion to create something, then send the result back almost immediately and ask it to review its own work.
Guess what?
That almost flawless creation will suddenly have several flaws.
It will point out possible improvements, security concerns, missing features, awkward sentences, better approaches, and rare scenarios that may never happen.
If you fix those problems and ask for another review, it will even find more.
The cycle continues.
To be fair, AI does not know when your project is good enough. It only knows how to respond to the next instruction.
Ask it to improve something, it will find something to improve. If you ask it to identify problems, it will give you problems. If you ask it to suggest more features, it will happily create a list long enough to keep you occupied for another month.
I once had Claude and ChatGPT modify each other’s code until one of them finally concluded that the code had become overengineered for the small function it was meant to perform.
The Feeling of Progress Is the Trap
AI makes it incredibly easy to feel productive.
Every new feature works as proof that you are making progress. Every rewritten paragraph feels like an improvement. Every detailed plan makes the project appear closer to completion.
But activity and progress are not always the same thing.
You can spend eight hours asking AI to improve a product and feel you are being productive. But the truth is, you are only drifting further away from releasing that product. The more you work on fixes, the more the ideas for more improvements.
The project grows while your confidence in releasing it shrinks; because you are stuck feeling like you need to fix everything first. But there is no end in sight.
Before AI, you might have stopped because you did not know how to implement an idea. Now, there is always another possible solution. There is always another prompt you can try. There is always another model waiting to give you a different answer.
You no longer have a natural stopping point.
AI Does Not Have Anything to Lose
You can personalize and humanize your AI assistant as much as you want. It’s still just a tool that feels nothing, and does not care if you launch today or six months from now.
It does not need the product to make money. It does not feel embarrassed when another unfinished project joins the stack. It does not lose customers because a website is rotting away on Laragon.
You do.
AI tools can help us make decisions, but they cannot accept the consequences of those decisions for you.
At some point, we must stop asking, “How can I improve this?” and start asking, “What is the smallest version I can release today?”
Those questions help us make 2 different decisions.
The first one keeps the project open indefinitely.
The second one forces you to choose what actually matters.
Use AI to Finish, Not Just to Build
The solution is not to stop using AI. I mean, you’ll be shooting yourself ridiculously in the foot!
The tools are useful, and they are only getting better.
The solution is to actually stop giving them control over the finish line. Stop letting them do the thinking for you. Why are you letting AI replace your thought process?
Ship that Imperfect Thing!
AI has made creating easier, but it has not made finishing easier.
If anything, it has given us more ways to avoid finishing while convincing ourselves that we are working.
There will always be another improvement to make. Another feature to add. Another prompt to send. Another model claiming it can produce a better result.
You have to decide when enough is enough.
The project does not need another review from ChatGPT or Claude. It needs real users. It needs feedback from people who are not programmed to provide an answer every time you ask a question.
Close the chat.
Push the project to production.
Let the imperfect thing exist.
If it works, push to production. We can always make revisions later.
