LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.

Product writer Pavel Samsonov argues that AI prototypes tempt teams to skip the first step in making a product: deciding what problem it should solve.

Pavel Samsonov writes The Product Picnic, a newsletter on UX and product management. He argues that AI tools have made it easier than ever to mistake a working prototype for a valuable product. Drawing on the chatbot pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum, he says that making a computer do something is neither the first nor the most important step in creating value.

• Samsonov argues that AI models are "just normal technology", and that treating them as special leads teams to lose sight of what people care about.
• He quotes a comment by Alexis Logsdon: AI models aim first to give the person prompting an answer, however wrong. Logsdon asks whose job it then is to check assumptions.
• He praises a guide for business people who commission software. It says to define the business rules first, and warns against handing a developer an AI prototype with the words "build this".
• He recalls many design workshops in which a problem statement beginning "how might we" ended with "using the power of generative AI". He advises cutting that ending, because a solution written into a vision statement never helps.

A team that prototypes with AI can write down the business rules before it builds the prototype, and hand them to developers with it. The guide Samsonov quotes is for business people who commission software, so applying it to product and design teams is an inference.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: Baking a solution into your vision statement will never serve you, in the end.

29 September 2026: when AI tools do the making, a team has to keep some of the old steps on purpose.