Why did I build a product no one needs? - by Mete Polat
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Why did I build a product no one needs?<br>AI compounds our best and worst tendencies
Mete Polat<br>Aug 11, 2026
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This week, I released Remarc - a macOS-native way to provide contextual feedback to AI agents. You can highlight any text in any app, annotate a screenshot, select a web element, and have your agent pick it all up and resolve it in a structured way.<br>And mostly nobody needs this.<br>So why did I build it? Why did I invest many weeks and late nights into obsessively designing, building, and polishing this shiny gizmo that will quietly sink into the annals of the internet? That’s what I’ve been asking myself for a while.<br>For the most part, the answers are simple but uncomfortable to face - I let myself get carried away with a shiny toy that I could keep infinitely tweaking with shiny new tools. It’s an experience that I suspect is becoming all too common as people go down vibe-coding rabbit holes.<br>It’s not all bad, though. Unconstrained exploration is sometimes the best way to learn new things, learn about yourself, and just have fun. And, in the end, that was my goal. At least, that’s what I tell myself anyways.<br>How It All Started
Like any side project, it had its innocent beginnings in my own problem - there was no good way to provide contextual feedback to AI agents on their own output. Let me explain.<br>Social media may make it seem that building with AI goes something like this - ask for the thing, blindly approve whatever plan it comes up with, get the thing you asked for. Post it on social with a caption “omg claude just one-shotted blah”. Profit.<br>But if you’ve ever worked on a real consumer or enterprise product, you know that every step of the process is followed by a dozen feedback loops and iterations. Have a PRD, design, or an early build? Here are a hundred comments, replies to those comments, and iterations based on those comments. The only way to build something great is through lots and lots of feedback and QA - from the team, from your users, and from yourself. Nothing good in this world is ever one-shotted.<br>There are a plethora of tools to collaborate with other humans, but surprisingly little to collaborate with AI. And while I’m a fan of chat as the primary AI interface, it just wasn’t cutting it for detailed contextual feedback I wanted to give to my agent. This thing you wrote here in this implementation plan? Change it to that. And that other thing - what did you mean here? And you see this button over there? Here’s a screenshot, I circled it. It’s missing a hover state. And this sentence in the 3rd paragraph of that draft - can you rephrase this?<br>If you’re an opinionated builder who wants things in a very specific way, this quickly becomes a nightmare. You either end up with paragraphs of voice-dictated feedback or a slog of resolving everything one by one. AI is great at parsing through messy feedback, but the rule of garbage-in-garbage-out still applies - if your feedback is vague and all over the place, the result will be about the same. You may be past one-shotting, but you’re nowhere near high quality. Congrats, you’re now in the messy middle, gripped by the sunk cost fallacy and overstimulated by managing 13 agents running at once.<br>And that’s where I found myself - I could easily get products to 90% completion with the current tools, but that last 10% of polish that makes products actually stand out was unnecessarily clunky. In other words, building with AI has a last-mile problem. And the reality is that many people don’t bother with this last mile, so there aren’t many tools out there to help you get through it.<br>So I decided to build one for myself.
What Went Wrong?
Glad you asked. Many things:<br>I couldn’t pull the trigger
I can spend all my time pontificating on the value of craft, the last 10% polish, and such, but all of that is pretty moot when whatever you’re building is not something other people really need. In other words, when it’s a vitamin and not a painkiller.<br>I learned that pretty quickly after putting out Remarc to early testers - it resonated with some people, but for the most part it didn’t become core to anyone’s workflow. Frankly, I noticed myself not reaching for it as often as I’d expect in my own work. That’s a red flag. But I ignored it because I was in love with the idea of this product.
I truly believe that many problems in this world, large and small, can be attributed to becoming disconnected from reality. Not being honest with yourself. Ignoring the data. Seeing reality for what you want it to be versus what it really is. Some delusion can be quite good, but how much is too much?<br>In a 1914 lecture on writing, Arthur Quiller-Couch dropped a timeless piece of advice that applies to a lot of creative pursuits beyond writing:<br>If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally...