AI's illusion of productivity

I spent a day this week building, shipping, killing ideas, writing articles, and having what felt like one of the most productive days. By the end of it I had:

A live product on two bid directories

A published article on the parallels between the bid site craze and crypto

Three dead ideas with documented kill reasons

A content strategy

A blog

A newsletter architecture

All of it appears impressive, however, what I have is a collection of things that feel done. Everything has the aesthetic of completion, a live product, published articles etc. Except, none of it has been tested by a stranger yet.

AI chatbots respond instantly, and often fail to push back on the premise. They produce things that look plausibly finished whether that be a strategy document, a product specification, or a content calendar. All of it can be smartly packaged, well formatted, giving great confidence, and yet completely weightless.

Because Lovable builds in minutes what used to take weeks, the ease of building is the illusion. Claude drafts in seconds what used to take hours. The difficulty that used to separate serious attempts from casual ones has been almost entirely removed.

It sounds like progress, but upon close examination it is not. The week it took to build something was also the week you spent questioning whether it was worth building. The hour it took to write something was also the hour you spent finding out whether you had something to say. The difficulty of doing something was a filter. Remove the filter and everything gets through, including the things that shouldn't.

besaved.lol has a literal graveyard, listings that ran out of time, that nobody saved, that died because the market didn't care enough to pay £1 to keep them alive. I built that graveyard feature because it felt poetic, I didn't realise I was also describing my own portfolio.

I currently have ten projects lying dormant, each built faster than the last. Each feeling, at the moment of building, like the breakthrough idea that retires my 9 - 5. AI removed the natural braking system, the cost of starting is now so low that the question "should I start this" barely gets asked. Just because something exists does not mean it matters.

You can feel productive all day without a single stranger doing anything because of what you made. Most people often miss the critical test of success. In the AI age, how much you shipped, how many ideas you generated, how clean the specification and how sharp the article reads does not matter so much.

The critical test is whether a stranger, someone with zero obligation to you, no relationship with you, no reason to care, do something because of what you made? That something could be a click, a subscription, payment, a save and a share. One stranger action is worth more than a day of AI-assisted building. An action is tangible, it costs the stranger something, attention, money, the social risk of sharing.

Ideas that survive come from a difficulty, from frustration, from experiencing something that everyone has a poor workaround on. AI is good at killing ideas faster. It can surface the fatal flaw in a product you thought ground breaking in ten minutes rather than six weeks of building.

AI holds the architecture while you think, it provides the scaffolding. It is a builder that never gets tired while simultaneously being a sounding board that will tell you when you are rationalising.

But the thing that makes any of it matter still has to come from you.

A stranger paying for your product or sharing your product is the only metric that counts.