2026-08-04
Should You Still Build an MVP in the AI Era? 211M Lines of Code Say Rework Went From 3.3% to 7.1%
Should you still start with an MVP, still ship in phases? Throw an idea at an AI and eight times out of ten it opens with let's build a minimum viable version — and that suggestion is memorized from its training data, not calculated. The Agile Manifesto is from 2001, The Lean Startup from 2011, and the methodology rests on one premise: that a crude implementation costs far less than a complete one. With AI that premise is gone. Telling Cursor to store it in localStorage and telling it to use PostgreSQL with a connection pool differ by minutes. Worse, the AI's bill is structured backwards from a human's: most input tokens are context, not the task, and two retries can triple the cost of a session. GitClear's analysis of 211 million lines found that code rewritten or deleted within days of merging has climbed from 3.3% to 7.1%. This piece takes apart why iteration was designed for human cost structures, and where doing it right once differs from doing it all at once.
