Product teams used AI to skip intent definition, corrupting the core planning process that design workflows require

Teams that struggled with product process saw AI as permission to avoid the hard work of defining why they were building something. Instead of fixing fundamental process gaps, they delegated strategy, research, design, and code generation to AI, letting individual developers act as their own designer, coder, and PM.

When intent passes through long AI workflows, frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content by the end, with other models failing more severely. The degradation gets worse with larger documents, longer interaction chains, or when distractor files are present.

Without a forcing function to explain work to colleagues, teams lost the clarity that a real product development lifecycle provided for free. The result is synthetic strategy docs feeding into synthetic PRDs feeding into synthetic code—each step removing another layer of connection to the original need.