No Excuses

Let’s face it: what took days a couple of years ago can now be done in hours or even minutes.

The AI revolution has taken software by storm, and for those who know how to use the AI tools available now, and are willing to pay for them (I was reluctant at first, I must admit), it can feel staggering how few limits are left.

Despite this, I see a lot of mediocre sites and software being shipped.

Recently I lost a client to another agency. They replaced the 8-year-old site I’d previously created for them (and recently pitched a redesign/rebuild for) with a fancy SvelteKit build.

Curious as to the quality of what my competitor had created for them, I ran a few checks, and let’s just say the results were mixed.

First, there was a disallow-all directive in robots.txt, which means the site became invisible in SEO terms for a few weeks (it’s been fixed since — to their credit). And beyond that, it had a performance score of 67 in PageSpeed Insights, which, to me, in the age we’re in, falls short of my standards.

The client is likely mostly blissfully ignorant of these technicalities.

But to me, if you’re going to build with AI in 2026, you have a responsibility to get it right.

In the old days, optimizing performance used to be somewhat of a headache. I can remember spending days troubleshooting sites to make them load faster.

But now, with AI at your disposal, in my opinion, if you miss something like that, it just shows that you weren’t looking in the right places, or thinking about it in the right way.

When it comes to making software, for a few bucks you now have infinite intelligence at your disposal. Your ability to direct said intelligence — or lack thereof — is what now makes the difference.

No excuses.