The AI App Paradox: Why We're Drowning in Tools but Starving for Experience
Every month, I watch 100+ new AI startups flood the market. Another agent builder. Another coding assistant. Another voice-to-text app. Yet here’s what keeps me up at night: I’m still not seeing truly powerful AI applications where the experience is so smooth and fluid that adoption feels effortless.
Then Claude Code dropped, and something clicked.
Instead of building yet another VS Code fork, Anthropic did something different — they built a command-line tool that slots perfectly into existing developer workflows. Simple. Powerful. No friction. That’s when I realized what’s been missing: we’ve been so obsessed with what AI can do that we forgot about how it feels to use it.
The Potential is Massive
We’re sitting on technology that can transform how we work, create, and think. But the winners won’t be the ones with the most features or the flashest demos. They’ll be the ones who crack the code on agentic experience — AI that doesn’t just respond to commands but anticipates needs, adapts to context, and feels less like a tool and more like a genuine collaborator.
The Next Frontier
The AI experience layer is the next frontier. Not the model. Not the capabilities. The experience.
2026 is going to reveal which teams actually understand this. I’m excited to see what breaks through the noise.
What’s your take? Are we building for features or for humans?