AI is fundamentally changing how we solve problems by forcing us back to first principles. The rapid advancement of AI capabilities isn't just changing what's technically possible - it's reshaping how users think about solutions themselves. Where we once accepted complex workflows and technical limitations as givens, AI allows us to strip away these assumptions and focus purely on desired outcomes. This shift means successful companies won't just adapt existing solutions to include AI - they'll completely reimagine what solutions can look like when unconstrained by traditional approaches.

Nobody Wants a Hammer

It reminds me of this principle from product management that says, "Nobody wants a hammer. What they want is a picture on the wall." The idea apparently traces back to Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt, who famously said: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole." (From his work on Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) thinking.) For decades, we've built businesses around optimizing the tools - better drills, powerful bits, perfect frames. Now with AI, we can often prompt the desired outcome directly into existence. And frequently, that outcome exceeds what we could have achieved as non-expert practitioners in much less time.

Getting Out of AI's Way

Nine months ago, while experimenting with ChatGPT, I built a workout timer. I was in the practice of prompting to generate code and then copying code into my project. When I wanted to add a feature or fix a problem, I'd write a prompt and then paste the code in to be updated. As I was working on this workout timer, I went to add a feature so I wrote out the prompt of what I wanted. This time, however, I forgot to paste in my code. The code this thing responded with nailed my features but also included a user experience FAR superior to what I thought I was iterating on. I realized we weren't writing code together. I really needed to just get out of this thing's way.

Beyond Feature Addition

Even at the organizational level, every tech company needs to reinvestigate their core assumptions. I was talking to a database company about potential new features. What we came back to was that first-principles consideration of the problem. What is the future of a database? There will always be this piece of infrastructure that allows us to store, index and search information. But from a product perspective, should it remain a tool for experts wielding complex queries, or evolve into an answer machine? Traditional system boundaries are dissolving. A "database" might now handle everything from storage to analysis to insight generation - fundamentally shifting what database engineers need to optimize for. While the exact path isn't clear, one thing is: successful database companies won't just be adding AI features - they'll be fundamentally rethinking what it means to store and access information in an AI-first world.

We are in such an interesting moment. Core business objectives - delivering customer value, solving real problems - remain constant. But everything about how we achieve these goals is in flux. Even more challenging, our customers are simultaneously reinventing their own organizations, potentially transforming who our users actually are.

The Stability Paradox

The path forward requires an almost paradoxical combination of stability and radical change. By returning to first principles, we can separate the fundamental problems we're solving from the historical methods we've used to solve them. This creates the mental space needed to imagine entirely new solutions. Take customer support: the fundamental need to understand and resolve user problems remains constant, but the entire support architecture might be reimagined around AI that can diagnose issues, generate solutions, learn from every interaction and escalate only a selection of issues, allowing the team to provide a better experience across the stack. The organizations that master this balance - maintaining clarity about core problems while embracing revolutionary solutions - will win.