Building With AI Is Just as Hard as Building Without It

Patrick Haede and Felix Haas on Founder Mode: why building got easier, but products did not get better.

Selina HuberCo-FounderJune 24, 2026

Superscale co-founder Patrick Haede sat down with Felix Haas on the Founder Mode podcast to talk about why building got easier but products didn't get better. They came at the question from opposite ends and landed in the same place.

Felix leads growth design at Lovable, the company that did more than almost anyone to collapse the barrier to building. Patrick builds an AI agent for performance marketers who have to make the output perform. Neither thinks the hard part got easier.

Felix: "Building something people love is still exactly as hard as it was pre-AI."

Patrick: "It has become easier to build something. It has not become easier to build something that works."

The gap between those two sentences is where most products die now.

Three Reasons Why

1. AI Seduces You Into Complexity

Because building costs nothing now, founders add features without end. Felix's picture for it: just because your car has more horsepower does not mean you need twice as many buttons in the cockpit. As the technology gets smarter, interfaces should be getting simpler.

2. The Models Are Building for Yesterday

Training data comes from the past. Prompt blindly today and you get a prototype that would have worked two years ago. Patrick builds for the model shipping in two months, not for the capabilities available right now.

3. The Prompt Box Does Not Solve the First Step

Felix's biggest learning at Lovable: you hand people a box where they can build anything, and most of them still do not know how to start. And even once the product exists, 100,000 customers on day one are not a given.

Building for a Product That Does Not Exist Yet

When Felix first met Lovable founder Anton Osika, the product barely existed. Osika already talked about it like a finished multi-billion-dollar company. "Delusional, in a very good way," is how Haas describes it. That is why he joined.

It is the same instinct as building for a model that has not shipped yet. You are building for something that does not exist yet, and then closing the distance.