The App You Should Be Building Is You
Everyone's racing to ship. Maybe the real leverage is standing still.
Everyone’s building apps. Cursor, Replit, Claude - the tools are so good now that the distance between “idea” and “working prototype” has collapsed to an afternoon. The timeline is seductive. Twitter is full of founders who shipped something over a weekend.
I get it. I’ve felt it too.
But after two years of living inside these tools and four months working as what I’d call an AI-native employee I’ve started to wonder if we’re all chasing the wrong thing.
The Race Everyone’s Running
The current narrative goes something like this: AI democratizes building. Anyone can be a founder now. Learn to vibe-code, ship fast, capture the upside.
And for some people, that’s exactly right.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: most people aren’t going to build the next breakout product. The odds are brutal, the timing is luck, and the market doesn’t care about your weekend prototype. What most people will do is continue working inside organizations - startups, enterprises, teams of various sizes.
And that’s not a consolation prize. That’s where the real opportunity might be hiding.
The Overlooked Play
Instead of asking “What app can I build?”, try asking: “What can I build that makes me dramatically better at my work?”
Not a product. A capability.
Something so tuned to your domain knowledge, your workflows, your judgment that it becomes inseparable from how you operate. A personal augmentation stack that travels with you.
This isn’t “I can use ChatGPT.” Everyone will be able to say that in two years. This is: “I’ve developed systems that let me do X at 10x the quality and speed of my peers, because I understand both the tools and the problem space deeply.”
That’s a moat. And it’s one that gets deeper the longer you invest in it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Over the past couple of years, I’ve built small things for myself. Not products - utilities. Workflows. Ways of operating that compound.
Research systems that pull together information faster than I could manually, but filtered through my lens of what matters
Writing aids tuned to my voice, not generic output
Analysis tools that handle the grunt work so I can focus on judgment calls
None of these are products I’d ship. They’re extensions of how I think. And when I brought that into a company, working as an AI-native employee, the leverage was immediate. Not because I knew more, but because I could do more, faster, with higher quality.
The Two-Year Horizon
Here’s what I think happens: in two years, basic AI literacy is table stakes. Everyone will know how to prompt. Everyone will have access to the same tools.
The differentiator won’t be “can use AI.” It’ll be “has built sophisticated, personalized systems that amplify their specific expertise.”
The people who start now who treat these tools as augmentation rather than product building will have compounding advantages. The muscle memory, the intuition for what works, the accumulated infrastructure.
The Quieter Path
I’m not saying don’t build products. If you have a real insight and the stomach for the startup game, go for it.
But if you’re feeling the pressure to race to ship something, to become a founder, to keep up with the timeline, consider that there’s another way.
Find a mission that matters to you. Find a company with a vision you believe in. Then use your advantage to contribute at a level that would have been impossible three years ago.
That’s not settling. That’s leverage.
The job market isn’t collapsing. It’s reshaping. And the people who figure out how to make themselves indispensable not by working more hours, but by working differently, will have options.