As AI makes feature creation trivial, the crucial skill for product builders will be ruthless simplification. The challenge shifts from "what can you build?" to "what should you *not* build?" to maintain clarity and usability in an age of abundance.
AI will democratize software development to the point where building your own custom apps becomes commonplace. Instead of settling for one-size-fits-all solutions, people will create "personal software" perfectly tailored to their specific workflows, like a custom workout tracker.
Kevin Rose discovered an unexpected use for vector embeddings in his news aggregator. By analyzing the vector distance and publish times of articles on the same topic, he can detect when multiple outlets are part of a paid PR campaign, as the content is nearly identical.
Don't dismiss AI-generated code for being buggy. Its purpose isn't to build a scalable product, but to rapidly test ideas and find user demand. Crashing under heavy load is a success signal that justifies hiring engineers for a proper rebuild.
Instead of just grouping similar news stories, Kevin Rose created an AI-powered "Gravity Engine." This system scores content clusters on qualitative dimensions like "Industry Impact," "Novelty," and "Builder Relevance," providing a sophisticated editorial layer to surface what truly matters.
For complex, multi-step AI data pipelines, use a durable execution service like Trigger.dev or Vercel Workflows. This provides automatic retries, failure handling, and monitoring, ensuring your data enrichment processes are robust even when individual services or models fail.
Kevin Rose, a partner at True Ventures, argues that most founders, especially those building profitable businesses up to $10M in revenue, should not raise venture capital. He advocates for retaining 100% ownership and only seeking VC funding when hyper-growth makes it an absolute necessity.
Kevin Rose demonstrates how modern technology can revive old ideas. He rebuilt a 12-year-old concept for a blog with a live, blurred video presence, which was previously infeasible due to the lack of real-time, client-side video compression. Advances in browser tech made it possible.
Reflecting on Digg and his fasting app Zero, Kevin Rose notes a pattern: his most commercially successful products started as passion projects built for fun, without any business model. Projects created simply to solve a personal problem often resonate most deeply with a wider audience.