The Prototype → Production Last Mile Problem

Daniel posed a good question on X recently:

If AI makes development easier and faster, why aren’t devs building more side projects?

More software is being created today than a year ago, as seen in the usage and revenue numbers from AI-powered tools like Lovable and Replit. I’ve heard countless stories of people using these tools to build simple apps for specific personal tasks.

What I haven't seen is a Cambrian explosion of new, production-grade software that’s ready to scale. Why is that?

The first answer to Daniel’s question is that most people are not entrepreneurial. The median employee clocks in and out, collects a paycheck, and spends their free time with family, on hobbies, or relaxing. Only a small minority voluntarily take on side gigs, let alone build novel software products for a public audience.

Second, there’s a "last mile" problem between building a prototype and shipping a production-grade application. It’s now trivial to create a working prototype. Rohan from Cursor shared an example on X:

During an enterprise demo today, Composer built the scaffolding for an e-commerce app in 5 seconds.

The entire auditorium couldn’t help but start laughing.

The hard part remains setting up all the things that turn a prototype into a production-grade application: scalable databases, seamless authentication, payment processing, subscription management, account settings, product instrumentation, customer support, and so on.

There are services that make these steps easier, but in a post-AI world, these tasks become the new chokepoints, rather than building the core product itself. I suspect we'll see companies like Lovable and Replit work to automate these aspects of software entrepreneurship. They want to have users with apps in production making revenue, because such users are far stickier than hobbyists.

While building a soon-to-be-announced data platform, I’ve learned a lot about these aspects of software overhead. I plan to write a markdown file to help agents bake standard SaaS best practices into future prototypes automatically. Hopefully, this will help reduce the duration of the last mile from prototype to production.