AI in product development: what's actually useful in 2025

Every week there's a new AI tool promising to replace your entire engineering team. Most of them are demos. A few are genuinely changing how we build. Here's an honest breakdown of what we actually use in production.

Code Generation: Still a Junior Dev

AI code generation (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor) is excellent at boilerplate, tests, and known patterns. It's not great at architecture decisions or novel problems. We use it daily — but always with a senior dev reviewing output.

"AI writes code faster than you. It doesn't write better code than you. Yet."

RAG Pipelines: Actually Production-Ready

Retrieval-augmented generation is the most practical AI pattern for real products right now. We've shipped RAG systems for customer support, internal knowledge bases, and document analysis. The tech is mature.

Agents: Promising, Handle with Care

AI agents (autonomous task runners) work well in narrow, well-defined domains. They fail unpredictably in open-ended tasks. We use them for data pipelines and scheduled automation — not for anything customer-facing without a human review step.

What We Skip

We don't use AI for design decisions, product strategy, or client communication. Not because it can't — but because these are exactly where human judgment and accountability matter most.