I’m Devin Hunter, the founder of White Mountain Codeworks, and I use AI every day in my small agency.

It helps me to draft ideas, speeds up tedious grunt work, and lets me troubleshoot problems more efficiently. After much experience with AI-assisted website launches, I can confidently tell you this:

AI is a phenomenal tool, but despite what AI influencers and hype merchants want you to believe, human expertise is still absolutely essential in web development.

Here is what I've learned as both a founder and professional web developer/designer who uses AI constantly.

Where AI Comes in Handy

1. Web Design Wireframes - Creating wireframes is one of my least favorite tasks. It is slow and tedious. While AI doesn't do this for me, it sure helps me with drafting and makes the process less painful.

2. Copywrite Brainstorming - AI tools help me to organize my jumbled thoughts into paragraphs when writing copy for websites (which I then refine) and also help draft content for headlines, web pages, or blog posts before I tweak and polish the final versions.

3. Saves Time When Coding - I use AI to write tedious front-end code that would take up a lot of my time without requiring me to really think about it, like rearranging rows and columns on a web pages for mobile responsiveness or resizing images. When it comes to more complex logic I like to do that myself. I've had AI hallucinate and screw up important functionality too many times to fully trust it with anything mission-critical.

4. Bug Troubleshooting - AI helps me to interpret obscure bugs such as Next.js, Git, deployment errors, etc. that I as a developer do not often encounter. I'd otherwise spend far too much time digging through Stack Overflow or GitHub issues looking for solutions.

5. Client Meeting Prep - Before a discovery call I like to use AI to help me draft a consultation script that covers most of my bases. Is helps to ensure I ask the most important questions and keeps the meeting focused.

6. Proposal Drafting - No one likes formatting proposals. I use AI to provide me with a proposal skeleton so I don't spend time wrestling with Word's styles or staring at a blank page wondering where to start.

Where I Find AI Falls Short Every Time

1. Brand Storytelling - AI can’t feel your mission or understand your values or your audience. It can't translate those things into the colors and typography that make for a unique, recognizable brand/online presence. You need a human touch for that.

2. Project Integration - So you need a website with a frontend, a backend, a database, secure login, and payment processing? AI might be able to create code soup that gets some of the individual pieces working, but it can't efficiently and securely tie those things together into a working product. You need a seasoned engineer for that.

3. Ethical and Legal Oversight - ADA compliance, data privacy laws, and industry-specific regulations require human oversight. Trusting AI with those things is a very risky gamble.

4. Creative Differentiation - AI is trained on what already exists, and it will produce something similar to that with which it learned from. If you want truly unique design and website features you need human creativity.

5. SEO optimization - AI can stuff a page with keywords or generate a basic meta description, but real SEO success requires technical configuration, keyword strategy, site architecture, structured data, backlink outreach, and content marketing over time. That’s not something you can automate and forget (something I personally learned the hard way).

A Real-World Example: How I Use AI in My Business

One of our clients, Valence Intelligence Systems, needed a fully functional website delivered on a tight deadline just ahead of a trade show.

Here is how AI helped and where White Mountain Codeworks needed to take over.

What AI contributed:

• Drafted the initial layout and page flow, giving us a quick starting point for structure.
• Generated first-pass copy for headlines and core sections, which we later refined for voice and clarity.
• Wrote repetitive front-end code, such as reusable components and basic layout scaffolding.

What White Mountain Codeworks Contributed:

• Custom visual design, including a clean and modern layout tailored to the startup’s brand.
• Logo revamping and full brand styling, including a custom color palette.
• Image sourcing and optimization, making sure all assets were sized, compressed, and properly integrated for performance.
• SEO best practices, baked into every page from day one to support search visibility.
• Secure and scalable architecture, ensuring the site would perform under traffic and grow with the company.
• Final deployment, hitting the client’s deadline with time to spare.

This project is a great example of how AI can accelerate certain aspects of development, but human creativity, technical expertise, and design thinking are still essential to producing a professional business website.

Conclusion

Here is the truth: In web development AI can only take you so far.

It can suggest. It can automate. It can even impress at times.
But it can’t replace the experience, strategy, and creative decision-making that go into building a truly effective, scalable, and on-brand website for a small business.

At White Mountain Codeworks, we use AI exactly as it should be used: as a powerful assistant, but not a stand-in for human expertise.

So if you’re a business owner who wants a high-performance website that reflects your brand and grows with your goals, you need more than ChatGPT.

You need a partner who knows how to use the tools and when to set them down.

Want to see what that looks like in action? Let’s talk.