Building with AI: Day One

Imagine this... You’ve built your career brick-by-brick in the tech world. You started as a programmer, moved into project management, became a product owner, and eventually co-founded your own company, stepping into the role of Chief Product Officer.

You assumed, reasonably, that your career trajectory would follow a well-worn path: hire developers, manage roadmaps, define goals, design products, and iterate through the classic cycle of build, test, launch, repeat.And then, AI came along and changed everything. Not in a slow, creeping way. In a sudden, world-tilting kind of way.

Suddenly, you’re not just setting expectations for others to build—you’re building things yourself. You’re developing at a clip that previously felt impossible.

More than that... you’re creating better products. Scalable, sophisticated, secure, and future-ready. I want to document this shift, not just in technology, but in my own mindset. Because this isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new identity.

About three weeks ago, I started experimenting with Replit, an AI-powered development environment. In that short time, I’ve been able to build not only websites, but fully functional applications, complete with API integrations that tie into our existing developer-built systems. It’s been startling.

I haven’t actively coded in years, and like many product folks, I’ve relied on developers to translate ideas into reality. But now, thanks to AI copilots, I’m doing it myself.

Disclaimer: I am not now - and never was - a senior engineer. But I am someone who understands how systems work. I know how to model databases, connect frontends to backends, and troubleshoot logic problems and I am an experienced Business Analyst.

With that foundational knowledge — and the help of AI — I can now build robust systems at a speed that would have been unthinkable even six months ago. I know there’s a lot of fear right now about AI and its potential to eliminate many of today’s jobs and the unpredictable shifts it will cause for entire industries. And I completely understand that concern.

But here’s what I believe — at least when it comes to tech - AI is not replacing developers. It’s abstracting development.

We’ve seen this before... Programming languages themselves are abstractions. Frameworks, libraries, platforms — they all help us move faster by hiding complexity. AI is just the next layer. But what’s different now is who gets to participate. People with product vision, UX instincts, and architectural understanding are now empowered to build. That’s a profound shift.

And that’s the story I will tell. One post at a time, one week at a time - documenting my journey, my product’s evolution, the feedback from our current subscriber base and ultimately, the impact this all has on our software company, Render.

In upcoming posts, I’ll give a brief history of what we’ve built at Render and how we’ve traditionally relied on human developers, and what’s changed over the past three weeks as AI has entered the picture. My hope is that this story resonates with others in the product space who are curious, maybe a little skeptical, and definitely anxious for what’s to come.

But here’s the thing... in just a few weeks, I’ve peeked into the future, and from where I’m standing, it looks very bright. Thanks for following the journey and I look forward to sharing more soon.

-moki