So i’ve been reading the news and deep diving on reddit for the past couple of months, as I validated the idea of Zarta. I spoke to many people from all walks of life.

Something that struck me seeing the trends in the news is that everyone nowadays is vibe coding, especially folks that were on the fringe and just did not know where to begin.

It’s all as simple as putting the prompt in an llm wrapper and voila, you are on your way, right?

I was speaking at the growth meetup in Wroclaw last week and here is what struck me. I had conversations with several folks, and almost every single one was either neck-deep in building mode or thinking about starting their own “company”.

AI chatbots, productivity dashboards, workflow automations, SaaS platforms. The ideas were impressive. The technical execution? Honestly, it was better than what took entire teams to build just three years ago.

But then I’d ask about customers. That’s when the energy shifted.

“We’re still figuring out our distribution strategy.” “Marketing is next quarter’s focus.” “We need to nail product-market fit first.”

Sound familiar? It should, because we’re living through what I’m calling the Great Building Paradox.

When Everyone’s a Builder, No One’s a Builder

AI tools have democratized software creation in ways we couldn’t imagine five years ago. GitHub Copilot writes your functions. v0 turns mockups into working apps. Claude helps architect entire systems. You can literally describe an idea and watch it materialize into code.

This is incredible progress. But it’s also created a blind spot.

Building used to be the hard part, the natural filter that forced founders to be intentional about what they created. Limited resources meant you couldn’t afford to build the wrong thing. Technical complexity forced deep thinking about user needs and market dynamics.

Now? That filter is gone.

The Fast Fashion Trap

What I witnessed reminded me of the fashion industry’s transformation. When manufacturing became cheap and fast, we got more variety but lost intentionality. Quality and purpose took a backseat to speed and volume.

I’m seeing the same pattern in tech. Founders are launching products before they understand their markets. Features get built because they can be, not because customers need them. Shipping velocity becomes the metric that matters, not customer value creation.

Result? A flood of well-executed products that solve problems nobody actually has.

The Skills We Haven’t Solved For

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: AI hasn’t made the hard parts of business any easier. Understanding customer psychology, building trust, crafting compelling positioning, navigating competitive dynamics – these remain fundamentally human challenges.

If anything, they’ve gotten harder because:

The noise floor keeps rising. Thousands of new products launch weekly. Breaking through requires exceptional clarity about why you matter.

Customer attention is finite. People aren’t adopting more tools just because more tools exist. They’re becoming more selective about what deserves their time and mental energy.

Trust still takes time. No algorithm can shortcut the relationship-building needed for sustainable growth, especially in B2B markets.

On Linkedin, Reddit, I often see brilliant technical minds struggle to articulate their value propositions. Not because they aren’t smart – because they’d spent their energy optimizing the wrong variable.

The New Success Equation

The founders I know who are actually winning don’t lead with their technical capabilities. They lead with their market understanding.

They know exactly who their customers are, how those customers make decisions, and what drives willingness to pay. They understand distribution channels, competitive landscapes, and market timing. When they talk about their products, the value is immediately clear.

The building becomes a vehicle for delivering that value, not the starting point.

Traditional formula: Great idea + Fast execution = Success

Reality-tested formula: Deep market insight + Customer obsession + Sustainable distribution = Success

Building is increasingly table stakes. Market navigation remains as challenging as ever.

The Contrarian Opportunity

While everyone else optimizes for development velocity, there’s massive opportunity for founders who optimize for customer discovery velocity.

Instead of asking “What can we build?” start with “What should we build?”

Instead of celebrating shipped features, celebrate validated assumptions.

Instead of measuring code commits, measure customer conversations.

The founders who master go-to-market while everyone else is figuring out go-to-build will own the next decade.

Practical Shifts That Matter

This requires different muscles:

Customer-first development: Build only what customers have explicitly validated they need. Technical elegance doesn’t matter if it solves the wrong problem.

Distribution-aware design: Create products that are inherently easy to discover, evaluate, and adopt. The best feature in the world is useless if nobody finds it.

Value-driven prioritization: Every development decision should map directly to customer willingness to pay. If you can’t draw that line, don’t build it.

Sales-informed strategy: Let customer conversations guide product decisions, not the other way around. Your prospects know things about your market that you don’t.

The Building Trap

The most dangerous assumption for technical founders right now is thinking building is still the hard part. It’s not.

The hard part is market navigation. Understanding who wants what you’re creating, when they want it, how they evaluate alternatives, and what it takes to reach them sustainably.

The hard part is customer development, not product development.

Where This Goes

AI will keep making building easier. Soon we’ll have agents that architect systems, design interfaces, and deploy applications with minimal human input. The technical advantage will continue shrinking.

But understanding markets, building relationships, and creating genuine value for specific customer segments? These remain fundamentally human challenges that require human insight, empathy, and judgment.

The winners will use AI as a building accelerator while focusing their human energy on market dynamics and customer psychology.

The losers will mistake technical capability for business capability.

The Real Test

As I left Wrocław, one question kept nagging at me: In a world where anyone can build anything, what actually creates competitive advantage?

The answer isn’t better code or more features. It’s deeper customer understanding, clearer market positioning, and more effective go-to-market execution.

The building revolution has arrived. The selling evolution is just beginning.

The founders who recognize this gap and focus accordingly won’t just survive the current bubble – they’ll thrive because of it.