Before you apply to ventureLAB's Hardware Catalyst Initiative, you need three things in writing: a product plan, an IP strategy, and a customer-engagement model. Together, those three documents make up a product spec. Founders who write the spec first can build the application in a day. Founders who skip it can spend a month on it.
I started selling technology in 1999. I built what I believe was Canada’s first cloud computing company, at a time when saying the word “cloud” in a boardroom still required a diagram.
Codalio Blueprint is a free, MIT-licensed plugin that adds 10 planning and review skills to popular coding agents. The flagship skill, prd-builder, runs three lenses (Product & Scope, Architecture & Data, GTM) and synthesizes a single PRD that resolves contradictions before anyone writes code. Later skills review what gets built — auth exposure, performance cost, silent regressions, and which tests are worth writing. Outputs land as files in your repo — not ephemeral chat — so builders read a durable source of truth.
Most AI tools will give you a demo. The question founders and operators actually ask is different: can I put a complete product in front of customers without hiring a CTO, a tech lead, senior developers, or cloud engineers first?
In April 2026 we ran that experiment. Four pipelines built the same meal-planning application. Codalio ran with no senior engineering team in the loop. Prompt-only Claude Code did not. We then scored every build against 111 things a customer would expect to work.