The Feature Paradox

Tareq Ismail recently posed a thought experiment that should keep every builder awake: If you could ship a thousand perfectly engineered features tomorrow with a single prompt, would your product be better?

The intuitive answer is "yes." More power, more utility, more value.

The reality is the opposite. You would likely end up with something simultaneously more powerful and entirely useless. You would have built a digital Winchester Mystery House—a sprawling, incoherent mess of rooms that lead nowhere and doors that open into walls.

In the old world, the cost of engineering acted as a natural filter for bad ideas. If a feature took six weeks and $50k to build, you made damn sure it was worth building. The scarcity of developer hours was a crude but effective form of product management.

In a world where AI makes the marginal cost of code near zero, that filter is gone. We are entering the era of The High Cost of Free Code.

The Jevons Paradox of Software

Economist William Stanley Jevons observed in 1865 that as technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, the total consumption of that resource actually rises.

We're seeing this play out in real-time. AI hasn't made us build less code; it has made us flood the world with it. When code is "free" to generate, the temptation is to solve every edge case with a new button, a new toggle, or a new dashboard.

But while the creation of that code is cheap, the cognitive load it places on the system—and the human using it—is more expensive than ever.

Every new feature is a new surface area for bugs, a new path for a user to get lost, and a new piece of "state" that your system has to maintain. The code might be free to generate, but the complexity is a permanent debt. In this environment, the most dangerous person in your company is the person who says "yes" to every feature request because 'it only takes five minutes to build.'

Masons Need Not Apply

For decades, the "Virtuoso" in software was the mason—the person who could lay bricks of code faster and more precisely than anyone else. The industry worshipped the "10x Developer" who could out-code a room full of seniors.

But when the bricks can lay themselves, the value of the mason evaporates. The new high-leverage skill isn't laying bricks; it's Urban Planning.

The most valuable builders of the next five years won't be the ones who can prompt the most features into existence. They will be the Product-First Engineers. These are individuals who have a deep, visceral understanding of the user's problem and the business's P&L, paired with the technical ability to execute.

When you give an engineer with a strong product mindset an AI co-pilot, they become disproportionately effective. Why? Because they know when to stop. They are the ones who look at a request for a new feature and say:

"We could build this in ten minutes, but it will confuse 10% of our users for the next two years. Let's solve this with a process change instead."

This hybrid skill set—ruthless product intuition combined with technical fluency—is the only skill that doesn't depreciate. If your only value is "building the thing," you are a commodity. If your value is "knowing what thing to build," you are the architect.

Disciplined Product Management is the New Strategy

In a world of infinite features, Disciplined Product Management moves from a "nice-to-have" organizational function to the core of the business strategy.

PMs used to be project managers—tracking tickets, managing timelines, and ensuring the "builders" were building. In the AI era, the PM's job shifts from Production Management to Complexity Management.

Their primary tool is no longer the roadmap; it's the Pruning Shears.

A disciplined PM understands that every "Yes" is a slow-acting poison to the user experience. They understand that a product's value isn't measured by what it can do, but by how effectively it helps the user achieve a specific outcome.

As the cost of building drops, the value of Intent skyrockets. The longest feature list has never been a proxy for the best product — and now that anyone can generate one, it's not even a differentiator. What remains is clarity: a ruthless understanding of the "happy path" and the discipline to protect it.

The Shift in Leverage

As builders, we have to rethink where our leverage comes from.

• From Code Scarcity to Intent Scarcity. The bottleneck is no longer "how do we build this?" but "why does this exist?"
• From Durable Features to Ephemeral Solutions. If software is cheap to generate, why should it be permanent? The best "feature" might be a piece of code that is generated on-the-fly to solve a specific user's problem and then deleted, leaving no residue of complexity behind.
• From Masonry to Urban Planning. Stop focusing on the individual bricks (the code). Start focusing on the flow of traffic (the user journey) and the utility of the zones (the business outcome).

The goal of software was never to "be built." The goal was to solve a problem. In an age of infinite building capacity, the discipline to keep the system small and the intent clear is worth more than any feature you could ship.

When anyone can build anything, the only thing that matters is knowing exactly what not to build.