> I believe most current improvement in speed is just moving from idea to demo in a few days
This is an outdated view.
Current timelines I'm facing are to be going from "thought", through customer trials and being fully live in the product and ready for sales in ~3 weeks (from kick off to live in app is a bit more than a week). This is for a full product feature that could easily be standalone. In 2023 I would say the timeline for a similarly shaped feature at another startup was around ~3 months (and the team at the time agreed that was an aggressive timeline). Bug rates are not noticeably different than other teams I've been on in the past 20 years.
Nobody I know working in startups is still building demos with AI like they were a year or more ago (for work), that's seen as largely a waste of time since you can just ship the feature and be experimenting with customers much faster.
On top of that everyone working in startup land knows that SaaS's days are numbered, so you need to be shipping working software fast enough you can get ahead of the curve to navigate where things are going next.
This is an outdated view.
Current timelines I'm facing are to be going from "thought", through customer trials and being fully live in the product and ready for sales in ~3 weeks (from kick off to live in app is a bit more than a week). This is for a full product feature that could easily be standalone. In 2023 I would say the timeline for a similarly shaped feature at another startup was around ~3 months (and the team at the time agreed that was an aggressive timeline). Bug rates are not noticeably different than other teams I've been on in the past 20 years.
Nobody I know working in startups is still building demos with AI like they were a year or more ago (for work), that's seen as largely a waste of time since you can just ship the feature and be experimenting with customers much faster.
On top of that everyone working in startup land knows that SaaS's days are numbered, so you need to be shipping working software fast enough you can get ahead of the curve to navigate where things are going next.