Like most developers, I've been using one of Claude Code, Cursor or Codex for over 2 years now, and I don't remember the last time I manually wrote a line of code. Whilst I'm now able to build products in one day that would have previously taken months, this new way of working has created two problems.
The first is a lack of focus. Previously, if I wanted to build an MVP for a product, it had to be something that I believed in enough to be willing to spend a few weeks of my life building obsessively. This meant that my ideas had to go through an internal triage process where I would consider whether I really cared about building it, and whether I thought it would actually be useful for other people. This process is important, because it creates a state of internal buy-in, which is necessary to keep up motivation when implementation and execution gets difficult.
In a post-AI world, you can pretty much build anything you can imagine within a few hours, so you don't necessarily have to fully buy into it to build it. As a result, my PC is littered with dead projects that never saw the light of day, because I either lost motivation or realized they didn't have legs. I'd start building without even considering who the target user was, what the go-to-market would be, whether I cared enough to work on it for a long time and so on. AI would also butcher some of the ideas in various ways, which brings me to the second problem.
LLMs allow us to outsource our thinking. When you don't need to write individual lines of code, you have more cognitive capacity for thinking about systems, design, user experience etc. The problem is that it can be tempting to outsource that thinking too. The less information you add to your prompts, the more creative control LLMs are forced to take. If you explain an idea to Claude Code in a lazy way (without crucial details), it will be forced to take executive decisions which may not align with your original idea.
As such, and as many have said, writing has become a much more valuable skill in a post-AI world. As Paul Graham has said, "writing is thinking," but I think it's even more powerful than that. Thoughts are fleeting, muddled and sometimes incoherent. Good writing requires those thoughts to be concrete, ordered and comprehensible. The process of writing and editing forces you to organize your thoughts in a coherent, structured way. Not only does good writing allow you to work better with LLMs, but it also ensures you don't accidentally outsource some thinking which may be crucial to the success of your startup.
Over the summer, I'm going to launch one product per week. To allow me to maintain focus and clarity of thought, I'm also planning to write one article/post per week on various topics. Some will be about what I'm building that week, but others will be about poignant topics like AI, software development, go-to-market, design and anything else relevant to people building software products.
I was trying to work out where to publish these posts. X doesn't work for long form written content and Medium and Substack felt too restrictive. I wanted a simple way to be able to show off my products/projects and allow people to subscribe to my free newsletter (via the profile) so I made this website. This is the first of the projects I'll be launching this summer.
If you'd also like a free place where you can write, gather a newsletter following and share your projects, feel free to create an account and get writing. I think writing will be one of the skills which separates good builders from great ones, and I'd love to have some great people on here with me.
Thanks for reading,
Chris
Originally published at cantible.com
