TAG

# MVP

2026-09-30

Taiichi Ohno: his product wasn't a car, it was the way to build one

In 1982 GM closed its Fremont, California plant, whose workers were considered the worst in the US auto industry. Two years later Toyota and GM reopened it as NUMMI; over 85% of the staff were the same people, now working under the Toyota Production System, and quality soon matched Japanese plants. The system's chief designer was Taiichi Ohno, and the 'lean' and 'MVP' that software people talk about every day trace back to his shop floor. No. 18 of the 100 product managers who changed the world, six dimensions 90/88/92/94/93/96.

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.