AI Didn’t Make Us Faster. It Made Us Honest

There’s something slightly uncomfortable happening in tech right now. This whole buzz around productivity has had us all questioning our life choices. But heres my two cents: AI didn’t suddenly make developers 10x more productive. It exposed that coding was never the real bottleneck. As a founder, that realization stings a bit.

For years, engineering bandwidth was the default excuse. We need more devs. We need more sprint capacity. We’ll ship it next quarter. But now AI can generate the code in minutes. So what’s left? The hard questions that we founders need to constantly ask and solve i think are:

• What problem are we actually solving?

• Why does it matter?

• Who cares enough to pay attention?

• What should we not build?

  
  

When I started building Saarthi, I genuinely thought the hard part would be the tech. Browser extension performance. Pulling data across thousands of mutual funds. Making hover states feel instant.Keeping it private and lightweight. What i realised at the end of that process was..drumroll.. All of that mattered. But it wasn’t the real challenge. The real challenge was clarity. What decision is Saarthi helping someone make in 5 seconds?

Early on, we kept adding more data points. CAGR, alpha, AUM, NAV, comparisons. It looked powerful. It felt like progress. But more information didn’t automatically mean better decisions. In fact, sometimes it created noise. I realised that the breakthrough didn’t come from building more and more but from reducing. From realizing investors don’t want a dashboard. They want confidence. Quickly. Before they get distracted or overwhelmed. That shift didn’t require better code. It required better thinking.

Execution Wasn’t the Constraint

By now, its clear to all of us that AI makes building easier. Which means if something still doesn’t work, we can’t blame velocity anymore. If we ship fast and it still doesn’t land, the issue isn’t code. It’s almost always misreading the user, overbuilding and saying yes to everything. AI removes the friction that used to hide fuzzy strategy. That’s the uncomfortable part.

The Real Founder Problem

In a world of infinite output, clarity is the only scarce resource left. You dont need AI to do that job. You just need to be clear about what you are building

And while you are at it, check out Saarthi from the chrome webstore.