The Conviction Gap is our term for the space cheap building opens up: the distance between what you can now build and what you have evidence to justify scaling. As AI drives the cost of construction toward zero, capability climbs steeply while conviction — real reason to believe an idea will work — stays exactly as hard-won as ever. The gap between them is not a tooling problem; it is a judgement problem.
It is the deliberate sibling of the acceptance-gap. Where the Acceptance Gap is about trusting an AI’s output (is this code shippable?), the Conviction Gap is one layer up: trusting the idea itself (is this worth building at all?). Closing it means separating two thresholds — a low bar to build-to-learn (cheap, disposable experiments) and a high, evidence-based bar to build-to-earn (committing real production surface area). The depth treatment is Deciding What to Build When Building Is Cheap.