43% of startups do not fail because the code was bad. They fail because the wrong thing got built. Not ugly code. Not missing features. Not “we should have used a different framework.” The product was simply solving a problem that was not painful enough, urgent enough, or owned by someone specific enough. That is the part AI makes more dangerous. Because now we can build the wrong thing faster than ever. So I built product-init . A hard-gated product discovery system for AI coding tools. It runs before your agent writes a single line of code. The problem AI coding tools are getting insanely good. Codex can ship. Claude Code can build. OpenClaw can orchestrate. Agents can plan, write, test, and deploy. But there is still one uncomfortable question: What if the goal is wrong? Most AI workflows start too late. They begin with: Build this app. But product failure usually starts much earlier. Before the first component. Before the first database table. Before the first API route.…