I love AI.
I use it constantly, I experiment with new models, I build things with it, and I genuinely think there are a lot of places where it can make software better.
But I am also getting more and more tired of seeing AI being forced into literally everything.
There’s a big difference between adding AI because it improves the product and adding AI because apparently every app now needs a little sparkle button that generates something.
Sometimes I open an app and there’s an AI assistant sitting in the sidebar, an AI summary button at the top, an AI rewrite option in every text box, and another AI feature hiding in the menu.
And I’m sitting there thinking:
Did anybody actually need this?
I still put AI in my own projects
So this isn’t me suddenly deciding AI features are bad.
I like building them.
If I can use AI to remove tedious work, help someone find something faster, make sense of messy information, or do something that would otherwise be difficult to implement with traditional logic, I’m interested.
What I’ve started caring about more, though, is whether the app still works perfectly well without it.
Lately, when I add an AI feature, I really like giving people a way to disable it completely.
Not just “don’t click the AI button.”
I mean turn it off and make the app look like the AI feature was never there in the first place.
No glowing icon.
No prompts asking you to try it.
No empty AI panel taking up space.
No constant reminder that apparently your perfectly normal workflow is missing something.
If you want the AI functionality, great. Turn it on.
If you don’t, the rest of the app should still feel like a complete product.
AI should earn its place
I think this is becoming one of my favorite rules when deciding whether something needs AI:
What does AI actually make better here?
If I can’t answer that clearly, I probably don’t need it.
There are plenty of problems that normal code solves extremely well.
Search doesn’t automatically need semantic embeddings.
A settings screen doesn’t need a chatbot.
A bookmark manager probably doesn’t need to summarize your bookmarks.
A button does not need to predict which button you were thinking about pressing.
Sometimes a filter is just a filter.
And honestly, traditional deterministic software has some pretty nice properties.
It’s fast.
It’s predictable.
It doesn’t hallucinate.
It usually doesn’t require sending data to another service.
It doesn’t suddenly cost more because somebody clicked the button 50,000 times.
There’s something refreshing about software that simply does exactly what it says it does.
Optional AI also makes the AI features better
Weirdly, I think treating AI as optional can improve the AI side of the product too.
When the entire app isn’t designed around the assumption that AI has to be involved everywhere, you’re forced to think harder about where it actually provides value.
Maybe there are only two places where AI makes sense.
That’s fine.
Those two features can be really useful instead of having twelve mediocre AI buttons sprinkled around the interface because somebody decided the product needed to be “AI-powered.”
I’d rather use AI for the parts where probabilistic reasoning, natural language, summarization, classification, or generation actually helps.
Everything else can just be software.
I don't think every product needs an AI identity
This might be the part I’ve changed my mind about the most.
For a while, especially when AI development started moving insanely fast, it felt like every new project needed to answer the question:
What’s the AI angle?
Now I don’t think that’s a particularly useful question.
Sometimes the answer should be:
There isn’t one.
I still love building with AI. I’m still fascinated by agents, language models, multimodal systems, local models, experimentation, and all the new capabilities showing up constantly.
But I don’t want AI to become the software equivalent of putting Bluetooth into a toaster just because we can.
The goal should still be to build a good tool.
Sometimes AI helps with that.
Sometimes the best feature you can add is knowing when not to add it.
Top comments (1)
Gracias :)