Last week, I had the same conversation with three different founders. All building companies and all of them refusing to use AI tools like Lovable or Replit for anything beyond quick prototypes.

"Dude, this feels like a bubble," one of them told me. "You can build fun stuff, but there's nothing meaningful you can build for the long-term."

At first, I thought they were being cynical. Then I noticed a pattern.

They think the hard part is building.

It's not.

Anyone can spin up a testimonial widget. Anyone can code a landing page. Anyone can ship a prototype in a weekend.

Then comes the actual hard part — maintenance.

When volume hits. When edge cases multiply. When the thing that worked at 100 users starts breaking at 10,000.

No engineer wants to sit at 2am debugging a tool they hacked together in Lovable. That's why they pay $10/month for something that actually works.

This is the framework that explains everything:

This creates four quadrants:

1. The Dead Zone (Simple + Low Usage) Where most AI wrapper prototypes live. They don't do much, and nobody uses them. This IS the bubble everyone talks about.

2. At Risk (Complex + Low Usage) You built something heavy and "meaningful," but it's too clunky. Enterprise software graveyard.

3. In Danger (Simple + High Usage) This is where the REAL danger lives. A "simple" tool gets traction, then collapses under its own success. The infrastructure can't handle growth.

4. Safe (Complex + High Usage) The Holy Grail. Handles complex needs at volume. This is why people pay for Zoho instead of building a "simple" version themselves.

Remember when the Y Combinator CEO publicly dismissed Zoho? "Why would a company pay for this?"

Because companies are buying the Safe quadrant. They're paying for someone else to handle maintenance, security, and scale.

The founders I talked to understand this. They don't want to babysit infrastructure. They want to build products.

Don't be the founder who celebrates traction while sitting on a house of cards.

The bubble isn't in the Dead Zone. Everyone already knows those tools are worthless. The bubble is in the "In Danger" quadrant — where success is the thing that kills you.

— Shashank