--- title: Building May Be Cheap Now. Being Wrong Still Isn't. description: AI has drastically reduced the cost of building software but has done nothing to reduce the cost of building the wrong thing. Drawing on Robbie Allen's... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/building-may-be-cheap-now-being-wrong-still-isn-t--njqjpilrm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Building May Be Cheap Now. Being Wrong Still Isn't. | daily.dev og:description: AI has drastically reduced the cost of building software but has done nothing to reduce the cost of building the wrong thing. Drawing on Robbie Allen's... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-may-be-cheap-now-being-wrong-still-isn-t--njqjpilrm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/NJQJpilrm.png og:image:alt: Building May Be Cheap Now. Being Wrong Still Isn't. og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Building May Be Cheap Now. Being Wrong Still Isn't. **[Viget](https://daily.dev/sources/viget)** · 7 min read · 0 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary AI has drastically reduced the cost of building software but has done nothing to reduce the cost of building the wrong thing. Drawing on Robbie Allen's distinction between build costs and ownership costs, and Ronny Kohavi's Bing example (100 engineers, a year of sunk time, a full rollback of a feature that failed experiments twice), the piece argues that discovery research is now more valuable than ever because it's cheap relative to the risk of shipping wrong. The proposed rule: do discovery research when uncertain about the problem, do prototyping and experiments when uncertain about the solution. A client case is described where a request to add an AI assistant was reframed after research revealed users struggled with evaluating relevance, not finding content, leading to a different, cheaper fix. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What happened with Bing's third search pane experiment described by Ronny Kohavi? Roughly 100 engineers built a third pane for Bing's search window, but experiments failed to show it delivered value. It was shipped anyway as a strategic business decision, and a year later, after further experiments still showed no value, it was rolled back at significant organizational cost, illustrating that a shipped product carries costs a disposable prototype does not. _Anyone weighing a costly feature bet can find similar experimentation lessons curated on daily.dev._ ### When should a team do discovery research versus just prototyping and testing? Do discovery research when uncertain about the problem itself, and do prototyping and user testing when uncertain about the solution. A well-defined problem with a small set of testable fixes, like checkout abandonment needing a progress indicator or guest checkout, doesn't need a discovery phase; building and testing both options teaches more in two weeks than research would. _Teams deciding between research and rapid testing can track similar product strategy discussions on daily.dev._ ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@confidentcoding** · 1 upvotes > So really, then it didn't ACTUALLY reduce the cost of building software, right? ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The feature is cheap to code, so we might as well build it. \(Probably not\)](https://daily.dev/posts/the-feature-is-cheap-to-code-so-we-might-as-well-build-it-probably-not--fsotesh3m) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The cost of saying yes has changed](https://daily.dev/posts/the-cost-of-saying-yes-has-changed-zqla2vfa5) · GitHub Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Build vs Buy When Building Just Got Cheap](https://daily.dev/posts/build-vs-buy-when-building-just-got-cheap-bxumyqpbm) · Tech Lead Digest · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why Not Just Launch It? \(AI Edition\)](https://daily.dev/posts/why-not-just-launch-it-ai-edition--moeub2row) · Itamar Gilad · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ux](https://daily.dev/tags/ux), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#product-management](https://daily.dev/tags/product-management), [#ab-testing](https://daily.dev/tags/ab-testing) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-may-be-cheap-now-being-wrong-still-isn-t--njqjpilrm) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Building May Be Cheap Now. 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