Vishal Kapoor’s 10 rules for building honest products with AI
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Affirm SVP of Product Vishal Kapoor outlines 10 principles for building AI-powered products that maintain user trust and honesty. Key rules include applying first-principles thinking, staying close to customer emotions, treating AI as a team member rather than a replacement, spiking on edge cases, tracking counter metrics alongside success metrics, failing fast through rapid prototyping, using creativity as a competitive advantage, blurring functional silos so PMs and designers can build, fostering safe experimentation culture, and avoiding 'AI slop' by prioritizing simplicity and transparency. Kapoor draws on Affirm's fintech context—where financial trust is paramount—and references tools like Figma Make, Cursor, Claude, and the Figma MCP server to illustrate how AI accelerates prototyping without sacrificing product integrity.
Table of contents
1. Put a high premium on first-principles thinking2. Stay grounded in deep human emotions3. Treat AI like another teammate4. Spike on the edge cases5. Embrace the counter metrics6. Rapidly experiment, and fail fast7. Use creativity as a competitive advantage8. Blur functional silos and treat everyone like a builder9. Make it fun (and safe) to tinker10. Be very careful about “AI slop”Sort: