A recent discussion around Ashley Rolfmore’s piece, "AI is stopping startups from completing puberty," has reignited a classic software debate on Hacker News. The consensus from the online commentary isn't that AI is useless, but that it makes papering over fundamental business flaws easier than ever. When growth stalls, founders often assume the team simply isn't working hard enough or utilizing enough AI—leading everyone to sprint twice as fast in the wrong direction.
For early-stage founders, "startup puberty" is the awkward phase where you must manually refine broken processes, directly engage early users, and build operational discipline. AI offers a dangerous illusion of progress: generating ten times as much code or marketing copy won't fix an unviable product-market fit, it just automates bad execution.
For small backers investing from £500, this creates a noisy signal. High output used to guarantee a hard-working, disciplined team, but today it might just mean automated scripts running over a flawed premise. When backing early teams, look beyond rapid feature rollouts and focus on whether the founders are doing the hard, manual work required to actually grow up.