Feature Theater: The AI Industry's Real Product Is Mediocrity at Scale
I've sat through a lot of sprint demos this year. And I've noticed something.
The demos got better. The products didn't.
Every two weeks there's a new screen, a new toggle, a new button with a little sparkle icon. Leadership claps. Then a customer opens the product and can't do the one thing they bought it for any faster than last quarter.
I wanted a feature in my demo talk track, so I vibe-coded a mock dashboard that sold the value prop. Real customer conversations then went somewhere else entirely. The mock is still in production. It means nothing, it only raises distracting questions, and it got there because the idea hadn't matured and the upstream plumbing wasn't in place.
In August I wrote about governance theater, my take on Bruce Schneier's "security theater": AI governance that reviews the code but never changes the decision. It gives the look...
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