Three questions to decide if an AI-built MVP deserves a real sprint

AI tools can now produce a functional MVP in a single afternoon, making the bottleneck no longer building but deciding what is worth building. A developer learned this lesson after pushing several AI-generated prototypes directly into sprints, only to find half stalled — not because they were broken, but because they lacked real purpose. To address this, three validation gates were introduced before any prototype earns sprint time: the problem must be explainable without the creator's narration, success must be defined by a measurable metric rather than a gut feeling, and the core premise must be explicitly stated and tested. Prototypes that fail any of the three gates are sent back for another AI iteration, a low-cost step now that regenerating a version takes hours instead of weeks. The author argues that as building gets cheaper, the scarce and valuable resource becomes sound judgment about what is worth building at all.