There’s a phase in product development people call “the fuzzy front end.” It’s the messy beginning – when you’re not sure what you’re building, who it’s really for, or whether the idea even holds together. Sketches on napkins was the trope, but by necessity artifacts wore their roughness openly. Appearance matched the maturity of the thinking.

AI broke that link.

Now you can go from a half-formed thought to a polished slide deck in minutes. You can generate a product spec, a competitive analysis, a functional prototype — all with the sheen of something that’s been through many rounds of review. The fuzzy front end can now look like a finished product.

And that’s genuinely disorienting.

But I’m starting to think the disorientation is useful. Polish was a lousy proxy for rigor. AI just made it obvious.