FEBRUARY 10, 2026 | ISSUE #6
The 80% Trap
The gap between ChatGPT and production-grade agents is infrastructure. And most teams are trying to build it when they should be using it.
You got results from ChatGPT and Claude before most of your peers knew what a prompt was.
That's the problem.
You're ahead. You saw what was possible early. Summarization, research, drafts, analysis. Things that took days started taking minutes. You started thinking bigger.
"What if we automated the whole workflow? What if this ran end-to-end?"
That instinct is exactly right.
But now you're stuck somewhere your peers haven't even reached yet. Context limits. Outputs that don't chain. Results that work Tuesday and break Thursday. Same prompt, same data, different output.
You're 80% there. You've been 80% there for months.
80% of the way there. For months.
I used to think the answer was better prompts. Or more engineering resources. Or just pushing through.
It's not.
The gap between ChatGPT and production-grade agents is infrastructure. And most teams are trying to build infrastructure when they should be using it.
The last 20% isn't a prompt problem. It's an infrastructure problem.
You don't need better prompts. You need production-grade systems that handle context management, workflow orchestration, and autonomous execution. The teams moving fastest stopped building the system and started using one.
FifthRow is in my portfolio because they already built what most commercial teams are still debugging. 150+ apps that encode consulting playbooks into autonomous workflows. Competitive analysis. Due diligence. Regulatory tracking. Venture scouting.
One team hit their full-year venture target in Q1. Nine months ahead. Not because they were smarter. Because they stopped building the system and started using it.
What To Do This Week
Audit your AI initiatives. Which ones have been "almost working" for more than 60 days? That's not iteration. That's the wall. Name it so you can solve it.
The 6% don't stay stuck at 80%. They use infrastructure that already exists.
From The Portfolio
FifthRow is running production systems for companies that got tired of building. 87% validation success rate. $674M in professional services value delivered. The infrastructure already exists. Learn more →
Stuck at 80%? What would you ship this month if you weren't still building?
Reach out. I'd love to think it through with you.
Talk Tuesday,
Jason Hauer
CEO, HauerX Holdings
jason@hauerX.com
