19 Sep 2026 · 3 min read
Building products with AI
We adopted the tools with an open mind, and now we build with them every day. Here is where we have landed.
We have always been on the side of AI. We are curious by nature, and we have embraced the tools as they arrived.
We were skeptical, and we used them anyway
Don't get me wrong — I was skeptical at first. When ChatGPT first came out, I was skeptical. When GitHub Copilot showed up opening its own pull requests, I was skeptical again. But I used them anyway, with an open mind. That is the part that mattered. We are now at the point where we fully embrace them.
I learned to code before the tools existed
I feel fortunate that I learned to write software before any of this existed. Those days are behind us now, and I am genuinely curious about what the landscape looks like for the people coming into it — they will have these tools from day one. I do wonder whether some of the intelligence around the fundamentals of software development will be lost along the way. Either way, I am grateful I learned engineering the long way round, before the tools could do it for me.
How we work now
At Savvy Labs, we now use AI fully. A few of us still write code by hand, but purely for the love of it — never for real product development. I personally am deep on the product side.
The tools are being tailored to software development so quickly that the barrier to entry is nearly on the floor. Standing up a working application now takes an inconceivably small amount of time. What that really buys us is time. All of the hours I get back go into the parts of building a product I could never properly attend to before.
Right now we are building a workflow — a set of skills and agents — that can take a product from an idea all the way to a finished, deliverable thing, without ever dropping our standard of technical excellence.
The bar has gone up, not down
I do not think we will ever lower our expectations of code quality. If anything, it has gone the other way. We expect more now than we ever have.
Keeping up
It is a fun time to be in this industry. It is also moving very quickly, and it is genuinely hard to stay on top of. There are now so many tools, so many offerings, so many ways of working that you simply cannot try them all — not to the depth where you could honestly say you understand them and can compare them. So we pick a set to keep working with. And because they change almost monthly, we still adapt often, and we deliberately foster that adaptiveness across the team and the company.