I've had an ongoing debate with a friend about what an MVP is worth. His argument is that when you are talking to potential customers, it helps to have something to point to (even if it is not what you are selling). Mine is that in the AI build first era an MVP proves less than it used to, even when someone signs up. My guess is the answer is somewhere in the middle, and we need a better way to measure it.
A working app used to take months and real money. That cost showed a founder believed in the idea, and early users could not get the thing anywhere else. The signup meant something because the rough version was scarce.
That scarcity is gone. Interest in a category can now be satisfied by a quick build with AI that looks finished from the outside, even if reliability and security were not a priority.
In February 2026 Martin Alderson recorded browser traffic while using Linear, handed the capture to a coding agent, and had a functional version of much of it about twenty prompts later, on a $200 monthly subscription. A public validation win is also an advertisement to whoever is watching that the idea is worth copying.
Proving the market first and defending it later made sense while copying took an engineering team and a quarter. My position is that it stops making sense when the copy arrives on the same timeline as the validation, so the moat question belongs in the MVP now, sitting next to demand.
A crawl gets the screens and the behavior. It does not get the data your users put in over months, or the corrections the product absorbed from real operation. What defends a business lives outside the codebase.
If you shipped a working version as your test, what did it prove that a landing page would not have?
Written by Duane Grey
AI Strategy & Implementation
Independent AI consultant helping companies cut through hype and deploy systems that produce real results.