When AI is enough
Let us start with when you do not need us. In some situations a website or small app built with the help of AI is a sensible choice, and paying for custom development would not make sense:
- A simple business card site. A few pages about what you do, with your contact details and opening hours. No logins, orders or connections to other systems.
- A prototype to test an idea. You want to show how a service could work and find out whether anyone wants it. A quick first version may be exactly what you need, even if you throw it away later.
- An internal tool for one person. A calculator, a converter or a simple overview that only you work with, where a mistake has limited impact.
What they have in common: the risk is small. Once customers, money, personal data or several people with different roles come into the system, the question changes. It is no longer just whether the code gets written. It is whether the system handles your operations correctly, and who will notice when something is wrong.
Seven things you have to solve even with AI
- AI does not know how your business runs. You have to tell it what happens with a return, a cancelled order, a failed payment, or when two people edit the same thing.
- The first version is easy. The tenth change is the test. What matters is whether you can still find your way around the system in six months and add features without breaking the original ones.
- Data and permissions. Who sees what, who is allowed to change what, how logging in works and how personal data is handled.
- Connecting to the real world. Payments, accounting, stock, carriers and other services have to work even when something does not go according to the ideal scenario.
- Launch and running it. Old addresses, search engines, hosting, backups, updates, monitoring and dealing with problems.
- Your time. A few weeks of tuning things with a chatbot may look cheaper on the invoice, but not necessarily for the business.
- Brand and interface. Working does not mean clear, pleasant or memorable. Content structure, copy and look are separate decisions.
On larger projects, three of these areas tend to matter most.
The brief decides, not typing speed
AI is good at building what you describe to it. Write “order form with card payment” and you can have a working first version very quickly. But the request itself does not say what should happen when a customer cancels an order after paying. Whether the goods go back into stock automatically. Who is allowed to change a price. What the accountant sees. Or what happens when two orders arrive for the last item.
If these situations do not make it into the brief, they can stay unresolved whether the code is written by a person or by AI. And these questions are mostly not technical. They are operational.
The answers often exist in the company, they just are not written down. Today a person handles them by hand and “it works somehow”. A large part of designing an application is bringing these situations into the open before anything gets built. What such a brief looks like is in our article What should a brief for an application include?
AI can write code fast. But first someone has to decide correctly what should be built. And then check that it actually does that.
The same goes for design and copy. With AI you can create very good design. Without a clear direction, though, you can easily end up with a website that is clean and modern, but interchangeable.
For a simple business card site that may not matter. For a company that wants to be recognisable and needs to lead customers to a specific action, content structure, UX and visual direction are part of the product.
Data, integrations and running it: what you do not see at first
The tenth change
The first version can come together quickly and look finished at first glance. The real test comes a few months later, when you need to add discount codes, a second language, a new type of order or another user role.
The question is not whether AI wrote the code. It is how the application is designed. If its parts were added one by one without a clear architecture, every further change can get harder. Fixing one thing starts affecting another, and adding features takes more time than it did at the start.
Who sees what
Having a login does not mean permissions are handled correctly. An application can seem to work without problems, while a user can, for example, get hold of data belonging to another account, or an employee can carry out an action they should not be allowed to.
That is why roles and access to data are not designed only around which button to show to whom. Permissions have to be checked at the level of the application and the data as well. In a system with personal or business data, a mistake is no longer just an inconvenience.
Connecting payments, accounting and stock
A payment gateway, invoicing tool, stock system or carrier has an API and documentation. So the connection itself can be built very quickly. Production, though, brings situations you do not see in the ideal scenario.
What if the service does not respond for a while? What if the same request arrives twice? What if a payment confirmation comes in late? What if part of a process completes and part does not? Someone has to decide what happens in these situations. And the system has to be able to tell that something went wrong.
Search engines and old addresses
When a new website replaces an old one, the new pages are not the only thing that matters. Search results, links from other websites, old campaigns or emails to customers can all point to the original addresses. If the URL structure changes, the old addresses need to be mapped correctly to the new ones, with permanent redirects in place. Otherwise visitors end up on a 404 error instead of the page they were looking for, and search engines have to process the changes all over again.
A migration also covers page titles, descriptions, internal links, the sitemap, canonical addresses and checking indexing. We describe how to handle the move in How to move an old website without losing its addresses?
After launch
A website or app does not end at launch. It needs hosting, backups that can actually be restored, updates, monitoring and someone who will notice when something stops working.
For a simple business card site, you can handle much of this yourself. For a system your orders go through or your business runs on, it is better to know before launch who will look after it.
How we work with AI
We are not against AI. We use it in development every day. It helps us prepare parts of the code faster, look for solutions, test variants and get from a design to a working version.
Decisions about the product, data model, permissions, architecture or deployment, though, are not left to a single prompt. We review, test and adjust the result in the context of the whole project.
So the difference is not whether AI is used. The difference is who decides what should be built, who checks the result and who will keep developing it. We go into more detail in AI in development: where it helps and where it does not.
How to decide
Go back to the three situations from the start. If you need a simple website, a prototype or a small internal tool, feel free to start on your own. AI can lower the barrier to entry considerably today, and for many projects that is a reasonable route.
But if customers, payments or more sensitive data will go through the system, if it will have several users and roles, or if it will connect to other services, plan for what comes after the first working version too.
And count your own time. If you spend dozens of hours tuning something that is not the core of your business, the right question is no longer just “how much does a developer cost me”. It is also “how much does it cost me to be the developer”.
If you are not sure where your project belongs, the article A website, an e-shop, or a custom application? will help. The calculator will give you an indicative scope.
You do not need a technical brief. Just tell us what you do by hand today, what does not work and what the result should look like. Through Discuss a project we can set up 30 minutes and even tell you if you do not need us.
