We use AI where it earns its place, and nowhere the judgment should stay ours. Here is exactly where the line sits.
The question is never whether we use AI. It’s whether the judgment is still ours. Yes, we use it — here’s exactly where.
People keep asking a version of the same question this year, usually a little nervously: are you using AI to make websites now, and should I worry about what that means for the thing you build me.
Yes, we use it. AI is good at the production middle of the work. It drafts copy you’ll rewrite, it gets a first layout on the page so you have something to react to instead of a blank screen, it writes the boring glue code we’d otherwise type by hand. That part is real, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise to sound principled.
But the question was never whether AI helps. It’s who holds the judgment. And that doesn’t move.
Here’s the thing these tools are quietly bad at. Ask one to design a homepage and it’ll give you something that looks right, the way every other homepage it learned from looks right, because that’s literally what it’s doing: averaging the middle of everything it has seen. Plausible is its native setting. A model has no idea whether your site is working. It’s never met your buyer, doesn’t know your CEO is going to skim this in eleven seconds between meetings, and can’t tell that the thing you’re proudest of is buried three scrolls down. It optimizes for looking finished. Finished and right are not the same word.
That gap is where a person has to stand. Somebody has to look at the plausible version and say no, the proof goes higher, that headline is hedging, this section is here because the model likes symmetry and not because anyone reading it needs it. That judgment is the whole job. It’s the part that’s accountable when the thing ships and a real person has to forward it to their boss.
So that’s our position. We let AI carry the parts that don’t need an opinion, and we keep a person on every part that does. You’re not buying the machine’s average. You’re buying somebody willing to put their name on what came out the other end.
There was a layout an AI tool suggested that looked fine on its own, but we overruled it because it broke the way the page actually needed to be read.