The Baroque Age of Products: When AI Removes Budget Constraints

Lately, watching our product at Predictable Machines evolve, I've been thinking about how radically AI has changed product development. The shift I keep coming back to is about budget.

For years, project managers had two jobs. Keep the project on its goals and roadmap, sure, but also guard the budget. Time was money, and every hour spent on a feature that "wasn't really needed" was a red flag worth raising in a meeting.

With AI, that math broke. The budget in time (not in tokens) is almost zero now. You can leave your AI assistant generating code overnight and show up to the standup the next morning with "a new brand feature" already half-built. Nobody had to ask twice. Nobody had to estimate. The thing just exists.

On top of that, AI assistants are particularly insistent on adding things. They love recommending new features, alternative approaches, more complex implementations. And there's no natural friction to push back, because hey, it cost nothing.

That's where the trap is.

The problem isn't just that the new features aren't needed. The deeper issue is that most of the work in building a product, the real work, was never about creating new features. It was about nailing the few that matter. Cutting, cutting, cutting, and being left with the one pearl everyone loves.

The discipline of product was always there to protect us from ourselves. Budget constraints, time constraints, headcount constraints. They were the forcing function. They made us choose. AI removes that pressure almost entirely, and what tends to fill the gap is everything. Every idea, every variation, every "what if we also..."

That's how you end up in the baroque age of products. Ornate, layered, over-decorated. A landing page with five hero variants. An onboarding flow with seventeen branches. A backend with three different ways to do the same thing because "the AI suggested it might be cleaner."

To be fair (and to be clear, this is my experience, not some universal truth), I think the answer is the same as it has always been. Stay focused. Repeat what's important. Question, every week, whether a thing actually belongs in your product. The principles from Getting Real and Rework, the whole "build less" school, didn't become outdated with AI. They became more relevant.

Product development becomes minimalist by necessity, not by aesthetic. And staying focused matters more than ever.

If you've been navigating the same thing, I'd love to hear how you're holding the line. Find me on LinkedIn or X, or drop me a note.