Developer Uses AI Agent to Stress-Test His Own Product Idea Before Writing a Line of Code

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A developer building 'Scout', a tabletop RPG session-tracking tool he hopes to monetise, deliberately held off coding to first investigate whether the product already existed. Instead of diving straight in, he tasked an AI agent with actively finding reasons not to build it, producing a 554-line sourced report two days later. The report confirmed that no single competing product covered all of Scout's intended features, though three separate tools each addressed roughly two-thirds of them. This left the developer in a position where the gap in the market was not absence of competition, but absence of integration. He framed the exercise as a deliberate shift from his past habit of building first and discovering rivals only after the fact.

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