AI Killed the MVP. What's next?

Where it started: me standing in front of a long aisle of dog food bags at Costco, racking my memory for which kind I was supposed to buy next for my finicky golden retriever, Kilo.

How it ended: me building Rotation List, so nobody will ever have to forget again.

It's the best app I've ever made, and the first I've created in partnership with AI. In the past, I subcontracted unimportant bits to AI. With Claude Code, I realized that was heirloom thinking in a genetically modified world.

What Did I Learn?

The era of the MVP is well and truly over. Minimal Viable Products were an artifact of an age of software scarcity.

Design was hard. Code was hard. Change was hard. Testing was hard. That's out.

What's in? MAX: Maximal Achievable Experience. (Or some other acronym—naming is hard.)

With AI-assisted development, there's no excuse for producing crap and calling it strategy.

We are now in an age of software abundance. Finally, after so many attempts at solving the "software crisis," it may actually be solved this time.

Now, you can produce a polished, full-featured version of a product on your first release.

But wait—changing code is hard, which is why we usually go minimal to avoid wasting time and effort.

Wrong. Agile, TDD, and "Doing the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work," if they ever made sense, no longer do.

Changing code used to be hard. Now, it's barely an inconvenience. Except for database migrations—those are still hell—you can now change code as easily as you can change your mind.

That's a completely new superpower, and it changes everything about how software is made and released.

It needs to be experienced to be understood. Managers may see story points flow by at warp speed, but to a programmer, the change is mind-blowing.

Once upon a time, there was a huge chasm between idea and execution. As a programmer, you hesitated to take that first step because you knew the destination was so far away you couldn't see the end. Writing software is just that hard.

Now, writing software is not quite teleportation, but the journey from idea to result is so quick and satisfying that people now complain that the art and skill of programming has been lost.

I won't say the skill of programming has been lost; it hasn't. You can't "vibe-code" your way into a truly great result yet. That still takes skill, art, taste, and cleverness. 

Rotation List has so many more features that were developed in so much less time for so much less effort, I can't even begin to tell you. I did in months what would have taken me years before.

That's the MAX age. Expectations for what software can do—and at what cost—have changed forever. 

And yes, I find that more than a little bit scary, too.