AI cannot plan

← All essays AI will build your roadmap in 10 seconds 10 February 2026 You can ask AI to think and plan, for example, to draw up a marketing plan for a project. And it will “think” and compose a beautiful text with arguments, breaking the plan down into stages, phases, periods, and categories. But this plan will have nothing to do with reality.Build a 7-year growth roadmap for my projectPhase 1 (0-6 months): launch, first 100 users from personal network and early adoptersPhase 2 (6-12 months): organic growth, 500-1,000 users, early feedback and product iterationsPhase 3 (1-2 years): product-market fit, 3-5K users, introduce paid acquisition channelsPhase 4 (2-4 years): scaling, 10-30K users, achieve sustainable revenuePhase 5 (4-7 years): maturity, 50-100K users, expand into adjacent markets and segmentsHow many downloads will my app get after launch?Pessimistic: 100-500 in the first monthRealistic: 1,000-3,000 in the first monthOptimistic: 10,000+ in the first monthHow do I attract the first users to my product?1. Create an account on Twitter/X and start posting build-in-public content2. Write an article on Hacker News3. Launch on Product Hunt4. Start a free newsletter with valuable content5. Find 10 relevant communities on Reddit and become an active participantThese answers are equally useless. Even if you provide him with the context of the project and the decisions made earlier, he still won’t be able to think. He will only write a plausible plan. In reality, you’ll find that posts on HN rarely make it to the front page, there is no one to send the newsletter to, X hardly ever generates clicks on external links, and Reddit bans self-promotion.He can convince you that your startup is definitely a blue ocean and your key feature is your product-market fit. But the future is stochastic. AI models cannot predict it. His pessimistic predictions are never zero. Most likely because the training data in such predictions most often does not have zero. Although if you ask him, “But there could be zero users in a year, right?”, he will agree with that. His predictions are just another way of saying “I don’t know”.Planning with AI is almost no different from planning by an incompetent person. A person without AI can draw up the same plan. But in most cases, whether it’s planned by a person or AI, the plan will not survive the collision with reality. People have always passed off plausible text about the future as forecasts. AI has simply accelerated this. Previously, it was expensive and time-consuming, so it seemed valuable. Now AI generates the same plausible plan in 10 seconds, and it becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes. What’s next? Subscribe by email for new essays, or get in touch. You’re subscribed. → ... Sent to . Check your inbox. Send to another email Contact Telegram: @askorchid Email: [email protected]

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