I've seen a lot of MVPs lately put together with nothing more than a few tokens and a rudimentary knowledge of building software. The barrier to getting projects off the ground is now incredibly low, and in many cases can be done by almost anyone.
The tools that facilitate this are genuinely impressive, and it's amazing to see how far people can get with them. A few years ago, the idea of going from a concept to a working MVP in front of real users without a development team would have seemed ridiculous.
That's a good thing. It means more ideas get validated, more products get tested, and more people are able to build things that otherwise never would have existed.
The trouble is that AI tools, as good as they are, currently have roughly the range of the world's best intern. They can get you surprisingly far, but eventually people hit the point where the MVP starts becoming a real business.
I've spoken to a lot of people recently who have something working, have users coming onboard, and are now starting to realise they don't fully trust the system underneath it.
That's the point where things suddenly become much more serious. Sensitive customer data starts flowing through the platform. Paying customers begin depending on it. Technical debt starts piling up. Founders start worrying whether the system is actually robust enough to survive real growth, or whether they're one outage away from angry customer emails and a very long night.
There's a huge difference between getting something "working" and building something operationally dependable.
That means thinking about things like security, testing, backups, monitoring and how the software will behave as more people start relying on it. These are concerns that can be relatively easy to overlook when the initial priority is simply getting something working.
It would be a shame to see genuinely good ideas stall because the tooling used to build version one isn't enough to take it to the next level.
That's where old-fashioned software engineering still matters.
If you, or anyone you know, has a product that has legs but needs help getting from MVP to reliable production software, feel free to get in touch with BitSphere.