It is a fair worry that a website built with AI is just a website nobody checked. If a developer says they use AI to build faster, you are entitled to ask who is on the hook when something is wrong.
The answer is the developer, every time. The tool does not sign the invoice, answer the phone at 8am when the contact form stops working, or fix the site in two years. So the useful question is not whether AI was involved. It is what happens to the work before it reaches your site.
I explain the longer version on the page about how I build, but here is the short version for anyone comparing developers.
Speed is only worth paying for if the checking stays
AI tools write a first draft of code quickly. That is the whole gain. A draft that took an afternoon now takes twenty minutes, and that time can go into the parts a client actually sees: layout, copy, speed, the forms working. A developer who saves the time and also skips the review has not made your site faster to build. They have made it faster to break.
The reverse is also true. A developer who refuses to touch these tools is not automatically safer. Plenty of old, hand typed WordPress sites are full of unmaintained plugins and untested edits. Careful or careless is a habit of the person, not a feature of the software.
Four questions worth asking any developer
You do not need to understand code to ask these. You need to listen for a specific answer rather than a reassuring one.
Who reads the code before it goes live? A real answer names a person and a step. A vague answer is a warning sign.
How do you test it? Ask what they click through before handing over: the contact form, the mobile menu, a slow connection, an old phone.
Where does my data go? If a tool is fed your customer list or your private pages, you should know, and you should have agreed to it.
What do I get at the end? You should own the site, the hosting login and the code, and be able to hand it to another developer without a fight.
What I would not hand to a tool
There are jobs I keep firmly in human hands. Anything touching payments, logins or customer data gets read line by line. So does anything that changes how a site behaves when something fails, such as what a visitor sees when the server is slow. A draft that looks fine in a demo can still fall over on a Monday morning with real traffic.
For plain jobs, like laying out a services page or writing a contact form handler, a draft is a sensible starting point. I still check it. The check is quick because I know what I am looking for, and that knowledge is the part that does not come from a tool.
The test results matter more than the tool list
It is tempting to ask which tools a developer uses, as if the list were the quality. It is not. Two developers can use the same tools and deliver very different sites. Better evidence is something you can see yourself: how fast the page loads on your own phone, whether the site still works when you switch to airplane mode on a train, whether you can edit your own opening hours without calling anyone.
If you want a plain way to judge speed, open the site on mobile data rather than office wifi. If it feels slow to you it will feel slow to a customer standing outside your shop deciding whether to ring you.
What it changes about price
Less typing time should mean less cost, and it does, but only on the parts that were mostly typing. Thinking, planning and checking still take the hours they always took. That is why a flat discount for using AI makes little sense. A fair quote is for the job, and the saving shows up as a site that arrives sooner and is easier to maintain. To see how a quote hangs together, how I quote a website walks through it.
Where to read next
If you want the longer story of what these tools changed in my own work, I wrote about it in what AI that writes code changed about my job. For the practical side of building a WordPress site faster, there is how I build WordPress faster with AI. And if you run a small business and wonder where this helps you directly rather than your developer, where AI actually helps a small business is the one to read.
The short answer
Ask who checks the work, how it is tested and who owns it at the end. A developer who answers those clearly will serve you well whatever tools they use, and one who cannot will let you down with or without AI.
If you are weighing up a developer in Hull or East Yorkshire and want a second opinion on what you have been told, book a free 30 minute surgery. Bring the quote and your questions, and I will tell you plainly what I think.
Free 30-min surgery
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