When Code Gets Cheap, Focus Gets Expensive
Context switching costs roughly 23 minutes of recovery time per interruption.
You can spin up a SaaS product over a weekend now. That’s not hype, it’s Monday.
AI coding assistants, vibe coding, and agentic workflows have pushed the cost of building software toward zero asymptotically.
A solo founder with Cursor and a clear idea can ship what used to take a five-person team and a seed round. Engineering stopped being the bottleneck sometime around mid-2024, and most of us are still pretending it didn’t happen.
The question isn’t “Can we build this?” anymore. It’s “What should we NOT build?”, and that’s a fundamentally different muscle.
Product Strategy Is the New Moat
When everyone can build anything, the differentiator isn’t technical execution. It’s judgment. Knowing which feature to kill. Knowing which customer signal is noise. Knowing when “not yet” is the right answer.
This is product strategy, and it just became the scarcest skill in tech.
The teams winning right now aren’t the fastest shippers. They’re the ones with the clearest intent. They have a tight thesis on who they serve, what problem they solve, and - critically - what they refuse to do. Think Linear’s obsession with craft over feature count, or PostHog’s decision to go all-in on engineers instead of chasing every buyer persona.
Focus is a strategy. Everything else is a to-do list.
The Focus Paradox
Here’s the part nobody’s talking about: the same AI tools making us faster are also fragmenting our attention into confetti.
Cursor open. Claude open. Jira in one tab. Notion in another. Slack pinging. A half-finished PRD in Google Docs. You’re context-switching six times before lunch, and the deep work - the thinking that actually moves the needle - never gets the uninterrupted hour it needs.
We gained speed but lost focus. That’s not a good trade.
The data backs this up.
Context switching costs roughly 23 minutes of recovery time per interruption.
Multiply that across a day spent bouncing between AI chat, project management tools, and your IDE, and you’ve optimized your way into a productivity trap.
Why I Built Yalp
I hit this wall myself while vibe coding in Cursor.
Ideas, tasks, and micro-decisions were being born inside AI conversations, but they were dying in chat history.
Every time I needed to capture a task, I’d switch to a browser-based to-do app, lose my flow state, and spend five minutes remembering what I was doing. The irony was painful: I was using AI to move faster while my workflow was slowing me down.
So I built Yalp.
It’s an MCP-powered todo app that works inside Cursor, Claude Desktop, or the browser - one synced list, no tab-switching. Tasks born in an AI conversation stay in your workflow. You capture, prioritize, and move on without ever breaking context.
It’s a small tool that solves a specific problem: protecting focus in an AI-native workflow.
The Takeaway
Code is cheap. Clarity is not.
If you’re a PM, founder, or builder right now, your competitive advantage isn’t how fast you ship. It’s how well you decide what to ship and how ruthlessly you protect the focus to do it well.
Audit your workflow. Count the context switches. Then eliminate half of them.
The next wave of great products won’t come from people who built the most. They’ll come from people who thought the hardest strategically.
Stay focused,
Samet Özkale, AI for Product Power
AI Product & Design Manager