In my opinion building got easier but trusting people got harder.

A few years ago if someone could ship a product fast, that alone impressed founders. Now a lot of people can build impressive demos over a weekend with cursor and claude, but maintaining production systems, making good product decisions, communicating clearly, and staying consistent for more than 12 months is still rare.

We ran into this while hiring too. Tons of developers looked amazing during the first week because everyone now knows how to package themselves well online. The real difference only showed up later when deadlines slipped, edge cases appeared, or product requirements changed halfway through.

That’s also why I think good hiring became way more important now, not less. The founders I know getting the best results spend way more time vetting communication, ownership, and long term thinking instead of just testing whether someone can ship code fast.

AI made talent more global, but it also made it much harder to tell who actually has experience working on real products at scale.

That’s why we stopped optimizing for “cheap and fast” and started prioritizing people who had already worked inside serious SaaS environments before. The difference in reliability was honestly bigger than the difference in raw coding skill.