Why AI Builders Are Publishing, Not Shipping

A lot of people are looking at AI projects right now and asking the wrong question.

“Why would anyone ship this?”

They would not.
That is the point.

What is happening right now is not shipping. It is publishing.

Shipping is commitment

Shipping means you believe the thing deserves to exist tomorrow.

It implies:

• support
• polish
• scale
• accountability

Shipping is expensive. It always has been. Even with AI.

Publishing is a probe

Publishing is different.

Publishing says:

• I do not know what this is yet
• I want to see who reacts
• I am testing for signal, not approval

Most AI builders are not trying to deliver finished products. They are throwing probes into the world to see what pulls back.

That is not sloppy. That is correct.

Time to product is short. Time to relevance is not.

AI destroyed the cost of creation. One person can now build something in days that used to take a team and a budget.

But relevance did not get cheaper.

You can spin something up fast.
You cannot force people to care.

So builders publish early to learn:

• who shows up
• what gets ignored
• what breaks immediately
• what sticks without explanation

Polish before signal is just wasted effort.

This is why weird things are winning attention

Projects like OpenClaw confuse people because they are judged with shipping criteria.

Who is it for?
What problem does it solve?
How does it scale?

Those are downstream questions.

Upstream questions are simpler and harder:

• does anyone engage
• does it create pull
• does it change behavior even a little

Early blogs, forums, mailing lists, and half broken web experiments worked the same way. Most disappeared. A few mattered. Nobody knew which at the start.

Stop comparing this to enterprise delivery

Enterprise software lives downstream.

Security reviews, compliance, uptime, polish. All of that matters once something proves it deserves to exist.

What is happening now is discovery. Messy. Playful. Inefficient by design.

Applying enterprise expectations here is like demanding SLAs from a zine.

Wrong phase.

Publishing is how builders think now

AI builders are acting like writers, not manufacturers.

They draft in public.
They revise based on response.
They abandon things that go nowhere.
They double down on what resonates.

This is why the obsession with locking everything down and logging everything feels off. That mindset assumes certainty that does not exist yet.

Most things published right now should never be production hardened. They should be learned from or thrown away.

That is how signal emerges.

The real mistake is confusing polish with seriousness

Unpolished does not mean unserious.

In this phase, polish often means fear.
Fear of looking wrong.
Fear of being judged.
Fear of learning too late.

Serious builders optimize for feedback, not approval.

Shipping comes later

Shipping still matters. A lot.

Shipping is how trust is built. How value scales. How responsibility shows up.

But shipping is something we learned over time.

In the 90s, people did not ship.
They published.
Personal sites, blogs, forums, weird tools, half finished ideas.
Most of it went nowhere.
Some of it quietly reshaped everything.
The discipline of shipping came later, after we learned what was worth carrying forward.

AI feels like that moment again.

Fast publishing.
Public learning.
Minimal polish.
Maximum exposure.
Shipping will return, just like it did before, but only after the shape of things becomes clearer.

AI Buddy is coming up on two years of writing in the middle of this phase. GPT-4 is already three years in, which still feels wild. We are no longer at the starting line, but we are nowhere near the stable part either.

For now, publishing beats pretending we already know what should ship.

Let’s see what this year brings.