You’re mid-conversation with an AI assistant. It’s been helpful. Then, somewhere around message thirty, it starts contradicting itself. It forgets what you told it ten minutes ago. It confidently suggests the thing you already ruled out. You know what happened… you’ve hit the context window.
Frustrating, right? But here’s the thing. We treat this like it’s a uniquely AI problem, like “losing context” is a technical limitation we’ll eventually engineer away.
I think it’s not. Companies do the same thing every day. They ship confidently into markets they haven’t actually looked at. Same failure mode: producing output without understanding what you’re responding to. We just didn’t call it “losing context”. We called it (and still do) “shipping fast”.
You thought it was a post about AI and context? Sorry, it’s not.
Ship It
“We need to ship it, fast”. You’ve heard it. Probably said it. The logic is seductive and the examples are always the same: the first laptop shipped fast, the first smartphone shipped fast, the first search engine shipped fast. Be first, iterate later. Move fast, break things, fix things, do stuff.
It makes sense, right? The historical record seems to back it up. Speed wins.
Except people conveniently forget why those products succeeded. It wasn’t just that they shipped fast. It’s that they shipped into something specific, in a specific context. Let me explain.
The Context
You know what? There was no laptop before the laptop. There was no smartphone before the smartphone, not really. AltaVista existed before Google, sure, but Google shipped something meaningfully different into a space where “meaningfully different” still had room to breathe.
What I’m trying to say is that “ship fast” works when you’re filling a gap that genuinely exists. The gap doesn’t have to be enormous. It doesn’t have to be a blank market. But it has to be real.
Your new todo app doesn’t have a gap to fill, there are thousands of them. Your AI project does no more have a gap to fill. Your note taking app doesn’t have a gap to fill, like at all.
Shipping any of these is the equivalent of suggesting the thing you already ruled out. Same confidence. Same lack of context. Speed doesn’t help when there’s nowhere to land. You can ship in two weeks or two days, and it won’t matter, because you’re not filling anything. You’re just adding noise to a crowded room.
This is what people (on purpose?) miss when they repeat the “ship fast” mantra over and over again. They’re quoting the outcome without understanding the conditions that made it possible. It’s like watching someone win the lottery and concluding that buying tickets is a solid retirement strategy. Would you think that?
Wait, That’s Not True
I already see you yelling at the screen: “But, but, X launched when Y already existed!?!”
I mean, that’s fair. That’s a real objection, right?
Let’s take Instagram as an example. It was a two-person startup in 2010, Facebook acquired it in 2012. Yeah, and social media was already there. Right. But, we are not considering that Instagram did fill a gap. Just not an obvious one.
Flickr was desktop-first. Hipstamatic had filters but no social network. There was no mobile-first, simple, social photo app that made anyone’s photos look professional. Isn’t that still a gap? Just not a “nothing exists yet” one. Probably, your objection will perfectly fit in the Instagram context. And that’s fine.
What I’m trying to tell you is that the gap doesn’t have to mean “nothing exists at all”, It can mean “nothing does this specific thing, in this specific way, for this specific audience”. See the context change? That’s a nice gap, don’t you agree?
Look, my point is not to “never ship fast”. I mean, yeah ship fast if you can. But my point is, please understand what you’re shipping into. Please, understand the context. Speed is a multiplier. Multiply zero by anything and you still get zero.
The AI Graveyard
Here’s where it gets worse. AI has commoditized speed itself.
A solo developer with a good prompt and a weekend can now ship something that would have taken a team three months in 2019. That’s genuinely remarkable. But it also means anyone can do it. Speed used to be a differentiator. Now it’s expected.
And when speed stops being scarce, what’s left? You got it: the gap. Or better, the context. The actual understanding of who needs what and why nothing else is giving it to them. The one thing AI can’t commoditize (for now, at least) is knowing what you’re responding to.
In the last weeks, my LinkedIn feed is exploding with “be fast” and “ship it” promotional posts, everyone understood that the barrier to shipping dropped, so more people are shipping products fast, and most of them are shipping without asking the hard questions first. Just because AI makes it so easy. And what if your idea fails? Who cares, just spend some more tokens on a new one.
The result? Well, the result is a graveyard. You can see it for yourself, aigraveyard.org and other similar (probably AI-built) sites track dead AI products, and $14.2 billion worth of them would probably agree that moving faster in the wrong direction means just failing faster.
A Fluenta report found that 9 out of 12 SaaS failures happened in markets that were already full. Not bad products. Not bad teams. Just no room. Speed without context isn’t a strategy. It’s just a more efficient way to be wrong.
Just, Ship It
Next time someone tells you to just ship it, ask them: ship it into what, exactly?
Context mattered before AI. It matters even more now. The only thing that changed is how fast we can ignore it. And ignoring context faster doesn’t make you move fast. It makes you the AI at message thirty, confidently suggesting the thing everyone already ruled out.