The Double Diamond and Design Thinking priced building as the risky, expensive step, but AI has cut prototyping costs by orders of magnitude, collapsing that premise. As a result, front-end research and ideation shrink to a one-page brief, while generation widens and the judgment budget—evaluating and choosing among many cheap options—becomes the real bottleneck. Hardware, fashion, and regulated industries such as medical devices and payments remain exceptions where building stays costly and irreversible, so front-loading still applies there.