#30. Weekly AI For Newsroom Roundup. Do we really hate AI? Oh, no, forget it...

Hello, this is Sergei.

I was going to write this newsletter about the recent AI backlash. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of posts, newsletters, and blogs where people seemed to be expressing some version of what Brian Morrissey recently wrote: “Everyone hates AI.” And honestly, I can understand why, especially looking at the recent news around OpenAI, Google. But let’s talk about something else instead. I believe much of this reaction is temporary and, to some extent, predictable. My hope is that going through this stage will help us govern AI better and, perhaps more importantly, hold the people and companies building it to higher standards.

So.

AI is changing the questions we ask when building products. Not long ago, the main question was how? How do we build this? Do we have the skills, time, and resources? Today, the questions are increasingly when? and how much?

For many products, the challenge is no longer whether we can build them. We can replicate the core functionality of many SaaS tools or create entirely new ones. The real question is whether it’s worth building, how quickly we can do it, and what value it creates.

And it no longer feels like “vibe coding.” We had our phase of generating apps from a few prompts. Now it seems we’re becoming more thoughtful. AI is less a magic trick and more a tool for building real products with intention. So we can drop "vibe" here and replace "coding" with a good old and simple "development".