I was wrong about AI and development. Here's what changed my mind.

A year ago, if you'd told me AI would touch a meaningful chunk of my actual paid work, I'd have pushed back. I thought of it as a toy for writing boilerplate — useful, but nowhere near the real craft of building something pixel-accurate, something that actually holds up in production.

I don't think that anymore.

I ship landing pages in 1-2 days now that used to take a week. Not because I cut corners — because AI removes the boring 60% (debugging syntax, Googling the same CSS trick for the hundredth time, writing the same n8n node logic from scratch) so I can spend more time on the 40% that actually makes a project good: animation feel, structure that won't break in six months, thinking about what the client actually needs.

Here's the part that surprised me most: the developers who are getting replaced aren't losing to AI directly. They're losing to other developers who figured out how to use AI as leverage, faster than they did.

I used to think "using AI" meant admitting I couldn't do it myself. Now I think refusing to use it is the actual risk.

Still think craft matters more than ever — AI can't tell you what "feels right" for a client's brand, and it definitely can't build trust with a design studio on a call. But the tools changed. Pretending otherwise isn't purity, it's just slower.

What's something you changed your mind about this year?