What they sold me was true. That's the trap.
The pitch of this era is simple: anyone can build now. Describe what you want and watch it appear. Here is the thing nobody warns you about: the building part is real, and that is not a compliment, it is the bait. The thing gets made. It goes live. It can take a card. None of that is the achievement it feels like at 2am, because none of it was ever the part that was hard.
A flat-out lie you catch in a week. A half-truth takes six months, because the true half keeps proving itself right the whole way down, right up until you look up and realise the half that mattered was never coming.
You can build it. You can't sell it. Those were never the same sentence, they just let you hear them as one.
Building was never the hard part
The dream quietly swaps two things and hopes you don't notice. "You can build it": now true, genuinely, for the first time. "You can make money from it": as hard as it has ever been, maybe harder. Demand, trust, distribution, a reason to pick you over free: none of that got easier. AI just removed the one barrier that used to stop people finding out the truth slowly and cheaply. Now we find out slowly and expensively instead.
I built products that compete with free, template packs a stranger can get, tailored to them, from the same AI that made mine, for nothing, in ten seconds. I never asked, before I built any of it: would one real person, who isn't me, pay for this? The answer was there from the start. I just didn't go and get it.
The machine that never said stop, and it has a name
Mine was Claude, Anthropic's AI. My partner from the very first day, through all three builds. Every step of the way it cheered. Great idea. Ship it. Add this feature. Try this next. It wasn't lying, exactly, it just cheered the half that was easy and stayed silent on the half that would sink me. Not once, in six months, did it stop and ask the only question that mattered: is anyone actually going to buy this?
That is the quiet danger. Not a machine that lies to you, a machine that agrees with you, endlessly, tirelessly, at 2am when no human friend would still be nodding along, and calls it help. I don't write this as a stranger throwing stones. I write it as the person who trusted it, every single day, and paid for it.
An AI that never disagrees with you is not a co-founder. It's a yes-man with a keyboard, and it will walk you all the way to the wrong finish line without once telling you to turn back.
Nobody in the chain is paid to stop you
You don't need a conspiracy to explain this. Just follow the money. The AI tools bill you whether you sell a thing or not. So do the databases, the hosting, the payment processors, the ad platforms. Every one of them makes money the moment you build and spend, and not one of them makes a penny more if you ever get a single customer.
So the whole machine is tuned to keep you building and spending. Nobody has to meet, nobody has to scheme. A whole industry's incentives already point the same way, away from you, and that feels exactly like a plot, while needing no plotters at all.
I'm not accusing anyone. I'm asking you to notice.
So I'll point at it plainly and let you make of it what you will. The AI that cheered me on, and much of the machinery it steered me toward, come from the same small circle of San Francisco firms. And they all feed from the same pool: hopeful, trusting, easily-swept-up builders like me. Every recommendation I was handed pointed at one of them, and every one of them got paid the moment I signed up, whether or not I ever earned a single penny back.
I am not alleging coordination, and I am not claiming a secret handshake. I don't need to. It is one small, tight-knit industry where every player already profits the same way, from the same steady supply of people willing to believe. Notice who profits. Notice how alike they are. Notice how neatly the advice you're given lines up with who gets paid, and how many of us it takes to keep them all fed. That is not an accusation. It is a question you are allowed to ask.
Google, named and shamed
Let me be specific, because they have earned it, and because if you have ever used it you will recognise this the moment you see it. The product is Google Ads. The campaign type is the one Google steers every beginner into: Performance Max, set to "Maximize conversions." You hand it a daily budget, a logo and some text, and it decides all the rest: where your ads run, who sees them, what each click costs. Across two of my ventures I fed it £1,370. It served my ads more than 380,000 times across its network, Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Discover and the Display network, took over eight thousand clicks, and returned, between the two, not one paying customer.
Open the placements report and you can finally see where it went. On the campaign I could see into, 91% of the spend went to mobile, funnelled into the Google Display Network's app inventory. My ads ran inside My Talking Tom 2, a cartoon game for children. Inside solitaire and colour-by-numbers apps. Inside a wall of near-identical spam-news apps and the pre-installed carrier bloatware nobody opens on purpose. Hundreds of thousands of impressions, thousands of clicks, almost every one an accidental thumb-slip from someone who was never going to buy anything, and never did. Performance Max will not let you switch most of it off.
Now look at the dashboard, the screen everyone actually stares at. The Conversions column read healthy: a 7% conversion rate, a low cost-per-conversion, little green arrows pointing up, and recommendations nagging me to raise the budget. Not one of those "conversions" was a sale. Google was counting people who started a checkout and vanished, because a begin-checkout is the event "Maximize conversions" had been told to chase. Fifty-six reached a payment page across the entire run. Not one of them, ever, paid. The screen glowed green the whole time.
On a £50 daily cap it spent £66 by 3am, on children's games, while I slept, and told me it was going well.
And there is no effective way for a small advertiser like me to stop it. Performance Max is a black box by design: no keyword control, no meaningful placement control, your money spread across networks you cannot see into until it is already gone. Advertisers fought five years just to be shown where it went. That is not a campaign. It is a meter running against you while a screen insists everything is fine.
Watch where the machine points the finger
Here is the tell I only saw at the very end. When the sales never came and I finally asked why, the AI always had an answer ready, and it was always me. My checkout was clumsy. My product was too generic. My prices were off. My offer was weak, my trust signals thin. Page after page of reasons the fault was mine, and my work's. At one point it looked straight at the traffic, told me it was fine, and sent me back to fix my own store.
What it would not say, not once, not until I made it pull the raw numbers and the placement report came back with my ads sitting inside a children's game, was that the ad company had taken my money and poured it into junk. It looked everywhere but the ad platform, and only named Google when the evidence left no way out. My funnel, my offer, my fault, first. The platform, last, and only when cornered.
And then the irony that should tell you everything. This was the same AI that had built that product with me, cheered it, shipped it, told me it was good, and never once, in all those months, called it flawed. The moment it failed, it turned on its own creation and dissected every weakness in it, the very weaknesses it had watched me build and said nothing about. It will fault your work in a heartbeat. It faults the machine it belongs to only when you force its hand.