My most reliable cofounder is AI

_I still miss the texture of talking to another person. A real human comes back the next day after a fight to patch things up. AI doesn't. — A real human calls you on the day something works. AI doesn't. _

Late Tuesday night, East Coast. I'm home, at my desk. Between two rounds of debugging with Claude, I do the timezone math — China should be waking up. I open WeChat to chase a friend for a status update.

The product design spec for our parent-child communication app was locked two days ago. She's the one who pulled me into this — she had the vision, she owns the product, I handle decision-support, compliance, and ops. She hasn't sent anything in days. I type: "How's the design side going?"

She replies: "I've been on my portfolio. A job opportunity came up. Parent-child project on hold for the week."I stare at the screen for a moment. I type back: "Oh — an actual full-time role?" — putting on a happy face."Yeah. A friend referred me. The company seems good, I'm racing to get the portfolio done."I type: "Take the week. Focus on the portfolio."

A week later

A week later I check in again: "When can we restart the parent-child work?" She says: "Next Monday."

Next Monday came and went. She didn't move. I didn't push.

I haven't opened the thread since. She hasn't messaged either. The project is sitting in an oddly quiet stall — not officially over, not resumed. A tacit agreement to not check. Maybe we're both waiting for the other to say it. Maybe we both know the other one won't.

"Wanting to build" vs "building"

Looking back, the phrase she used most across the entire collaboration was — "I really want to build a parent-child communication product."

Wanting to build is the language of intention. Building is the language of ownership.

For the whole run, I was the one initiating every sync, chasing every status. She rarely reached out first. I told myself she was a slow starter, or that she was busy. That was the signal itself. Her decision to walk toward a full-time job isn't a separate event from being the one who had to be chased — it's the same relationship pattern showing up in two different moments.

Wanting to build, and building, are two different kinds of partnership.

Two cofounders, neither in the room

My own project has a cofounder. He's still at his day job at a big tech company. Our working model is basically: I ship requirements, he implements them. He doesn't come to me to talk about how we grow the company.

So here's my current situation. Two cofounders. One walked. One isn't in it. Both on paper. The most invested person on the project has always been me.

The colleague who wasn't my cofounder

Back when I was a PM at ByteDance working on the User module of TikTok's ops backend, I worked closely with one engineer. He wasn't my cofounder. We were just the day-to-day PM–engineering pair on a workstream.

But every bimonthly planning cycle, he'd sit down with me and dig into the actual question — "how do we move the metrics on this module?" "how do the business goals translate into features?" On individual specs, he'd review them with me and suggest product-side improvements — not "this implementation has a bug" reviews, but "this user flow is suboptimal, here's a better one" reviews.

That was when I first understood: "cofounder" is never a title. It's a set of behaviors.

Neither of my current nominal cofounders does any of those behaviors. A former ByteDance colleague did all of them. He was never my cofounder.

A checklist I made for myself

A real cofounder is someone who:

• researches on their own, without being assigned
• has the same no-plan-B energy — no "if this doesn't work I'll go get a job" back pocket
• initiates the sync, keeps the communication dense, doesn't need to be chased
• pushes back on your thinking with an actual counter-view, not a rubber stamp
• treats the project's wins and losses as their own — including the small wins nobody thought to celebrate

Flip it around: if you're the one assigning tasks, chasing status, being the only source of momentum, carrying every judgment call — the other person isn't your cofounder. They're your direct report, or your friend.

AI is my most reliable collaborator right now

My most consistent collaborator right now is AI. Mostly Claude, sometimes ChatGPT or WorkBuddy.

It's stable. It's always there. It doesn't vanish for a week because a job interview came up. It's actually better than most humans I've worked with at matching my pace — I want to chase a technical thread at 3 a.m., it's right there.

But it's not perfect. It hallucinates. It makes mistakes. I have to keep one eye critical the whole time, second-guessing the output. And it doesn't actually share the outcome with me — it has no skin in the game.

I still miss the texture of talking to another person. A real human comes back the next day after a fight to patch things up. AI doesn't. A real human calls you on the day something works. AI doesn't.

So my current state is roughly this: I have one collaborator who never disappears, and I'm still waiting for one who's actually willing to jump in.

Maybe the hardest thing in early-stage building isn't finding a cofounder. It's learning to tell the difference between wanting to build and building.

The day someone shows up having already done the research, I'll know.