Discovery Is Not Optional When Agents Can Deliver Instantly
Cagan's core warning is that output without outcome is waste dressed up as progress. For an AI-native company, that warning doubles: an agent can generate, deploy, and iterate a feature before a founder has paused to ask whether the customer wanted it. Building evaluation harnesses before the agent runs is the same discipline Cagan asks of product teams before the sprint starts — get the success criteria clear, or you are optimizing a direction you haven't chosen yet.
Viability Is the Risk Agents Cannot Assess Alone
Of Cagan's four risks, viability — will the business actually work — is the one no agent can own. An agent can check feasibility by trying, approximate usability by testing flows, and probe value through signals. But viability requires judgment about tradeoffs, customer trust, and long-run positioning that lives in a human's head, not a prompt. Founders must hold that question themselves; delegating it to the workflow is how you build something technically impressive that the market ignores.
Continuous Discovery Becomes Continuous Calibration
Inspired treats discovery and delivery as parallel, ongoing loops rather than sequential phases. In an agentic company, the delivery loop runs so fast that discovery must run equally fast or fall permanently behind. That means founders need lightweight eval signals wired directly to real customer behavior — not quarterly reviews. The eval harness is not a QA step; it is the discovery apparatus, surfacing whether what the agent shipped was actually what the customer needed.
