Founders, be honest: are you building an idea AI gave you?
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No judgment, genuinely curious. How many of us asked ChatGPT for app ideas at some point, then ended up building one of them, or half-building it? The line between "my idea" and "the model's idea" got blurry this year. Where did your current project actually come from?
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Interesting thought. The hardest part is finding the wedge people really need and AI is still "Artificial" :). Cannot mimic real life problems.
Opposite direction here. The idea came from running my own crypto project and drowning in multi-account content chaos, years before I could ask a model for startup ideas. AI entered later, as the thing that made the solution buildable solo. Curious if that's the more common pattern in this thread: pain first, AI as the enabler, not the source.
SlimSnap
@vladimir_iudin Same shape for me. The problem was there long before I could have asked a model for it, I was already annoyed at pasting screenshots into an agent that couldn't read them. AI didn't hand me the idea, it made a one-person version of the fix possible. The ideas a model gives you cold are the ones you drop the first hard week, because you were never actually angry about them.
@bickov The cold idea thing matches my experience too. Before SelfSM I sketched a couple of ideas that came from brainstorming sessions rather than my own problems. Both died at the first boring week, there was no anger keeping them alive. This one survives bad weeks because I spent two years doing the manual version and I still remember how much it sucked.
Honest answer: a model can hand you a hundred ideas in a minute, but it cannot tell you which one you will still care about at month six, once it stops being fun. That filter is not intelligence, it is conviction, and conviction usually comes from a problem that has genuinely annoyed you in real life. So I think "whose idea was it" matters less than people fear. If a model surfaces a pain you recognize instantly because you have lived it, the idea was already yours and the model just gave it words. The failure mode I would watch for is the reverse: a clever suggestion for a problem you have never actually felt, because that is the one you quietly drop the first hard week. Good question to put out there.