Why AI Is Changing Product Development - But Isn’t Replacing Developers (Yet)Sam Crosher, CTO @ Verticode

April 29, 2025, 1 min read

How AI is Helping Product Development

Today’s AI tools can be brilliant for product development when they’re used properly. They help automate repetitive tasks, generate code, suggest improvements, and even help troubleshoot bugs faster. If you know how to guide it, AI can act like a productivity multiplier, allowing experienced developers to build products in a fraction of the time it used to take.

At Verticode, our approach is a blend of AI, pre-built frameworks, and expert developer input. We’ve built a system where AI helps speed up the initial foundations, our custom boilerplates allow for rapid and stable setups, and our developers bring it all together with experience-led coding, decision-making, and quality control.

That’s how we deliver fully functional, scalable MVPs without cutting corners. The key is that AI assists the developers - it doesn’t replace them.

Why Developers Are Still Essential

AI can follow instructions. It can complete simple tasks. It can even write convincing-looking code. 

But what it can’t do, and won’t be able to do anytime soon, is think like a developer.

Great product development is about more than just writing lines of code. It’s about understanding the business goals, making judgement calls about architecture, thinking ahead to scalability challenges, and adapting when a project inevitably changes mid-build. It’s about creative problem-solving, choosing the right approach (not just an approach), and being able to predict and manage technical risk.

AI doesn’t understand your product vision. It can’t weigh up trade-offs between technical debt and time-to-market. It doesn’t have intuition, experience, or common sense.

Right now, even the most impressive AI models can only accelerate good development, they can’t replace it.

And if you try to use AI as a substitute for skilled developers, you’ll likely end up with something that looks fine on the surface but crumbles when it faces real users, scaling challenges, or business pivots.

A Word on "Vibe Coding"

There’s a phrase I’ve been hearing more often lately: vibe coding.

It’s a weird term, but it’s a real phenomenon.

Vibe coding is when people use AI to generate code without truly understanding what they’re building, just sort of “vibing” their way through the project. They give vague prompts to an AI, get back something that looks like it works, and move on without properly thinking through the architecture, edge cases, or long-term consequences.

If you know exactly what you want, know how to direct the AI properly, and know how to check and refine the results, then AI can be a powerful tool. But when AI replaces the thinking part of development, when it’s used to do something you couldn’t have built yourself, that’s when problems start.

Software isn't just about making something that works once. It’s about creating something reliable, maintainable, scalable, and fit for purpose. And that still requires human developers who know what they’re doing.

The Future of AI and Development

I’m genuinely excited about where AI can take product development. At Verticode, it’s already helping us deliver better MVPs faster. But it’s not a magic bullet.

AI will keep getting better at assisting developers, automating repetitive tasks, and speeding up workflows.

But as long as building great products requires understanding, creativity, and critical thinking, developers aren't going anywhere.

At Verticode, we’re using the best of AI, combined with real developer expertise, to help founders launch faster, smarter, and stronger.