Claude will help you build anything. That's the problem.
A C-suite executive and repeat investor pitch participant noticed a pattern after spending time building with Claude: the model enthusiastically assists with any product idea without ever asking whether anyone actually wants it. The result is a productivity high that burns hours on polished prototypes for concepts that haven't cleared a single market question.
So they wrote three custom Claude skills - saved prompt instructions that trigger automatically based on specific phrasing - to interrupt the build reflex before it starts. The three are called prove-the-premise, hobby-or-business, and one-real-conversation.
The names do the work. Prove-the-premise pushes back on assumptions before any code gets written. Hobby-or-business forces clarity on whether this is something you're doing for fun or something you expect to pay rent. One-real-conversation demands evidence of at least one actual conversation with a potential user - not a friend, not a spouse, not imagined feedback.
This is a real limitation worth naming directly: AI coding and ideation tools are built to help you execute, not to protect you from your own enthusiasm. When you describe an idea, Claude and most other AI assistants respond with building blocks, not skepticism. That asymmetry is genuinely useful if you've already validated the idea. If you haven't, it just makes it faster to build the wrong thing.
The fix here is a prompt engineering workaround, not a product feature. But it points at something the tools themselves should probably address: a challenge mode that treats new product ideas with the same scrutiny a good co-founder would apply.