Still Aiming for Indispensable

Two years ago, I wrote about my espresso machine.

The short version: it had become so ingrained in my daily life that I couldn't imagine living without it. And that, I argued, is the rare distinction every digital product should aim for. Not "useful." Not "nice to have." Indispensable.

Two years later, the espresso machine is still running strong. The argument is too. But almost everything about how we build products has changed, and it's worth being honest about what that means.

What changed: the how

In 2024, "AI-assisted development" mostly meant autocomplete with good manners. Today, agentic AI does real engineering work.

At Foxbox, we use tools like Claude Code to plan tasks, write code, run tests, and iterate on their own output while our engineers direct, review, and make the judgment calls. Work that took a team a sprint can take a developer an afternoon. Prototypes that used to take weeks now happen before the second meeting.

This is not a marginal improvement. It's a different physics of product development. And here's the uncomfortable truth that comes with it: when building gets cheap, building the wrong thing gets cheap too. The market is now flooded with products that were technically easy to create and strategically pointless. You can vibe code something into existence, ship it, and hope for the best.

Some of it demos beautifully. Almost none of it survives contact with real users, real data, real security requirements, or real scale. Speed without direction just gets you lost faster. Which is why I think our argument from two years ago hasn't just held up. It's been magnified.

What didn't change: the aim

Understanding customers is still the whole game. AI can generate a hundred feature ideas in a minute. It cannot tell you which one your customer will build their morning routine around. That still requires sitting with real people, watching where they struggle, and digging past the surface. If anything, the discipline matters more now, because the temptation to skip it is stronger. When you can build anything instantly, deciding what deserves to exist becomes the scarcest skill in the room.

Testing every assumption matters more, not less. Back then I wrote that CI/CD, automated testing, and user validation were non-negotiable. In an agentic world, they're the difference between a product and a liability. AI-generated code needs the same rigor as human-written code, arguably more, because it's produced faster than any human can casually eyeball. The teams winning right now aren't the ones generating the most code. They're the ones with the strongest systems for validating it: automated test coverage, security review, human judgment at every checkpoint. Velocity without verification is just risk at scale.

Building for the long haul is now the dividing line. Two years ago, shortsighted products found their way to the recycling bin. Today they get there faster, because users have more alternatives and less patience. A vibe-coded app might launch in a weekend, but the first HIPAA audit, the first traffic spike, the first integration request will expose exactly how it was built. Architecture, security, maintainability, and scalability were never visible in a demo. They were always what separated products that last from products that trend. That gap is now a canyon.

Indispensable products are still growth engines. This part hasn't budged an inch. When a product becomes something customers can't live without, it becomes the beating heart of the business that built it. AI didn't change that equation. It just raised the stakes on both sides. The ceiling for well-built products is higher than ever, because small teams can now deliver what used to require large ones. And the floor for careless products is lower, because the market can see the difference immediately.

The aim is the advantage

Here's how I'd put it now: agentic AI made building easy. It made building something indispensable harder to fake.

Anyone can generate software. Fewer can generate trust, and trust is still earned the old way: through products that work every time, respect people's data, and fit so naturally into someone's life that their absence would be felt.

The tools changed. The economics changed. The aim didn't.

If you're trying to figure out what indispensable looks like for your customers in an AI-native world, and how to build it properly, we'd love to talk.