How to Build a Slow Product in the Fast AI Era

The developer of Mole, a Mac and Windows cleanup tool, describes spending two months on unscalable work: installing and uninstalling 850 Mac apps one by one to build cleanup rules, testing more than 30 AI tools in real use, and redrawing dozens of icons over three rounds. Mole went from 1.13 to 1.18, added AI tool and System Data cleanup, shipped a Windows version on October 14, and passed 72.9K GitHub stars. The author argues that as AI makes code cheaper, the details learned only by doing the work yourself increasingly set products apart.