Tired of Feature Factories? Welcome to Feature Inflation (thanks AI!)
Anyone who's been in the trenches of software and product development for a while has had this secret dream: a world with no feature factories. A world finally liberated from the unstoppable cycles of building things just for the sake of velocity. Or any other vanity metric, you name it…
Well, I got some bad news. AI isn't killing the Feature Factory - it's about to turn it into a giga-factory.
I'm mentoring right now at Product Makers. We show non-technical PMs how to build functional prototypes with AI tools. The energy in the room is electric. People who've never written a line of code are suddenly creating working apps. It's amazing and it's empowering.
And it's also the beginning of something that should start worry about (and prepare for).
The Word Inflation
Talk to any marketer right now. Go ahead, ask them how their content strategy is performing. You'll hear the same refrain: "Nothing works anymore."
I have a friend working as a copywriter for an online agency. She told me few days ago straight up, showing me a performance dashboard for one of her clients: "We've tried everything imaginable. Different angles, channels, formats. It all just... vanishes."
The problem isn't her strategy. In her case, not even the quality or originality of the content. She's doing everything right, and it still doesn't work.
The problem is that the internet has become an infinite ocean of noise.
When AI makes writing essentially free, words (and inherently the thought behind them) lose their scarcity value. The flood of content has become biblical. And we're all drowning in it.
Thinking is the most expensive activity the human body performs. Nothing burns more energy than deep cognitive work.
This is why writing used to be costly - because genuine thought is costly. I'll spend months writing my book, a book that someone will consume in a weekend. Or the five-page strategy document I’m writing for the client I’m working with right now took me around two days of mental wrestling, yet takes minutes to read.
When ChatGPT generates those same five pages in seconds, our brains know the difference. It seems we are smart enough to distinguish between words that cost brain power and words that cost tokens.
The Mother of All Feature Factories
Now imagine this happening to software development. We spent years fighting the Feature Factory mindset. AI is about to automate the conveyer belt, and increase its speed 100x.
It’s April 2025, and we are in the "vibe coding" phase.
Non-technical folks can build impressive things in hours, but they're not production-ready. Give it 12-24 months (which in AI time is practically a century), and creating production-grade software will be as simple as writing a blog post (well, maybe not this one).
What happens when the cost of building drops to near zero? It's a hard question with complicated implications. Will the world be a better place? (I doubt it).
Research shows that 45-60% of features we build today are rarely or never used. That's with traditional development, where building has real costs and friction. Natural breaker, people resisting, engineers complaining that its’ hard or impossible to ship as fast as the managers ask for.
Now imagine when everyone in the room can spin up their own fully functional app over lunch. A flood of noise, things floating nowhere, apps, features, millions of (possible) solutions for a limited number of problems or user needs.
The Philosophical Stone
What if everyone suddenly had a device that could extract gold from anything? Like the alchemists' dream of the philosophical stone, but real and distributed to everyone.
Would gold still be valuable? That's exactly what's about to happen to software.
Today, ideas are cheap (everyone has ideas) and execution is expensive (not everyone can build).
Tomorrow, execution will be trivial and judgment will be the scarce resource.
The pendulum is swinging so far in the opposite direction that it's going to knock us all off our feet.
The Software Apocalypse
Try to picture this: app stores with millions of nearly identical apps. Every possible variation of every possible feature, all built by AI in response to casual prompts…
The mother of all Feature Factories won't just produce more features… it will produce infinite features.
And in that infinity, value itself becomes harder to define, harder to find, harder to defend.
The more accessible building becomes, the more valuable thinking becomes.
So What Survives the Flood?
In my opinion, the irony is beautiful: the more accessible building becomes, the more valuable thinking becomes. When everyone can create anything, the competitive advantage shifts entirely to knowing what to create.
We enter an era where product management isn't about managing backlogs or writing user stories. It's about being the last line of defense against the tsunami of possibilities. It's about having the capability to say "no" when saying "yes" costs nothing.
The future belongs to those who can adapt by thinking more, and thinking better. By distinguishing from the ones not thinking, or outsourcing their thinking to the machines.
In my upcoming book, I explore this phenomenon in depth - why it's happening, what it means for product organizations, and most importantly, how to navigate this new reality without drowning in the flood.
The strategies for survival aren't what you might expect, and the implications go far beyond just product development. If this future terrifies you, you're not alone. But there are ways to not just survive, but thrive in the age of infinite creation.