AI won't build your software for you (yet)
· 2 min read · Kelly
AI development has picked up a bit of a bad rap in the software world, and some of it’s fair. “Vibecoding” — typing “build me an app” into a chatbot and shipping whatever comes out — is something just about anyone can do now. It has real upsides: it’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s efficient. It’s also, a lot of the time, insecure, sloppy, and held together with tape.
That doesn’t make AI bad. It makes it a tool. And like any tool, the result comes down to who’s holding it.
There’s an old joke I like. A guy takes his car into a body shop to get a dent pulled. The mechanic looks at it, reaches behind the panel, taps it once with a hammer, and the dent pops right out. Then he hands over a bill for $110. The guy loses it: “A hundred and ten bucks to hit my car with a hammer?!” The mechanic shrugs. “No. Ten dollars to hit it with a hammer. A hundred to know where to hit it.”
That’s software development right now. The hammer got really good. Knowing where to hit is still the whole job.
We’re steering, not self-driving
People talk like AI can build the whole thing for you. We’re not there yet. Right now we’re in steering mode, not self-driving. AI can take hours of grunt work — boilerplate, bug hunting, a first pass on a code review — and squeeze it into a fraction of the time. That part is real, and it’s great. But it needs careful planning, guardrails, and someone deciding what AI handles, what a human has to check, and how the two fit together. Let it run loose and you get the tape-and-glue version that falls apart the moment real customers touch it.
The work didn’t vanish. The planning, the reviewing, the testing — all still there. It just takes less time when the tools are used properly, which means more careful checking, not less.
What this means for your business
Here’s the part that matters if you run a small business: custom software just got a lot more reachable.
If you’ve ever bent the way you work around software that doesn’t quite fit — kept a spreadsheet on the side, done something by hand because the system won’t let you do it any other way — that’s the gap a custom tool fills. And the kind of thing that used to be priced for big companies with big budgets is now realistic for a small business, because building it properly takes less time than it used to.
It’s not magic and it’s not free. But the math has genuinely changed, and I learned the old, expensive version of it the hard way. Plenty of things that were out of reach a couple of years ago are worth a conversation now. If that sounds like your situation, that’s worth a chat.