Somewhere in your company, right now, a designer is agonizing over the spacing on a prototype that engineering is going to rebuild from scratch. A PM is spinning up yet another feature variant on a whim. An engineer is quietly wondering why they’re debugging code that will never ship.
AI-powered prototyping has rewritten how we build. The old product development lifecycle has given way to one where working software shows up at every stage of discovery. Teams move faster. Ideas get tested earlier. Engineers stop building features no one wants.
But prototyping is not a cure-all. As teams adopt it, two new failure modes are emerging — both undermining the very promise prototyping was supposed to deliver:
The polishing trap: teams spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting prototypes, trying to close the gap between what they’re prototyping and the production software they’ll eventually put in front of customers. They agonize over pixel-perfect spacing. They iterate on details no customer…
