5 AI Tools That Have Changed How Our Developers Work

AI has well and truly moved past the hype stage. For website development teams, it’s no longer a question of whether to use it — it’s a question of which tools are actually worth the time, and how they are revolutionising the digital workspace.

At Platform81, our developers have spent the past year testing, adopting, and in some cases ditching AI tools to find what genuinely makes a difference to the way we work. 

Not every tool that promised to change web development actually delivered, but a handful of them have become a staple part of our process — helping us write cleaner code, move faster, and spend less time on the repetitive stuff that eats into a project.

In this article, we’re sharing the AI tools that have earned a permanent place in our dev team’s workflow, and why we think they’re worth knowing about.

AI Tools Our Web Team Are Loving 

Cursor

If there’s one tool that has genuinely changed the way our developers write code day to day, it’s Cursor. Built on top of VS Code, it feels immediately familiar but adds a layer of AI assistance that goes well beyond simple autocomplete. 

Our team uses it to write, refactor and review code with AI that understands the full context of a project — not just the file that’s currently open. For a team working across multiple bespoke client projects, the ability to move faster without cutting corners on quality has been a real shift.

Scribe

Not every AI tool is about writing code. Scribe sits in a slightly different category — it’s a workflow documentation tool that automatically generates step-by-step guides as you complete a process, capturing screenshots and annotations along the way.

For our team, it’s particularly useful for internal processes and client handovers. Instead of spending time writing up instructions manually after completing a piece of work, Scribe captures what we’ve done as we go. It’s the kind of tool that doesn’t feel exciting on paper but quietly saves a significant amount of time each week.

Emergent

Emergent is an AI-powered app development platform that allows our developers to build and prototype applications faster than traditional methods would allow. It’s a useful tool for early-stage scoping — getting something working quickly so we can evaluate an approach before committing significant development time to it.

For client-facing work, being able to move from brief to prototype at speed is a real advantage, and Emergent has become a reliable part of how we explore ideas in the early stages of a project.

ChatGPT

We’d be leaving something out if we didn’t include ChatGPT. It’s not a development-specific tool, but it’s become a regular part of how our developers think through problems. Whether it’s talking through a tricky piece of logic, generating boilerplate, or quickly drafting technical documentation, it’s the kind of always-available resource that gets called on throughout the day.

Raycast

Raycast is a Mac launcher that has grown into something much more useful than its description suggests. For our developers, it acts as a central hub for navigating between tools, running scripts, managing snippets and accessing AI directly from the keyboard — without breaking flow to open a browser or switch applications.

The productivity gains from Raycast aren’t dramatic in any single moment, but they add up. It’s the kind of tool you don’t really notice until you try working without it.

What AI Can’t Replace in Web Development

For all the time AI tools save us, there are parts of web development projects where they don’t come close to replacing what an experienced developer brings to a project.

The most obvious is judgment. AI can generate code quickly, but it can’t evaluate whether an approach is right for a specific client, a specific codebase, or a specific set of constraints, making it risky to rely solely on AI code. That kind of decision-making draws on experience and context that no tool currently has access to. Our developers still make the calls that matter, and that isn’t changing any time soon.

Creativity is another area where AI has clear limits. When we’re working on a bespoke build — designing an interaction, solving an unusual UX problem, figuring out how to bring a client’s vision to life technically — the thinking that goes into that is genuinely human. AI can support the process, but it isn’t driving it.

What AI has done is free up more of our developers’ time and headspace for exactly this kind of work. The repetitive, time-consuming tasks that used to sit alongside the interesting work now take up less of the day, which means more focus on the things that genuinely require expertise.

What This Means for Our Clients

The practical outcome of all of this is that our clients get better work, delivered more efficiently. When our developers are spending less time on the repetitive parts of a project, they have more capacity to focus on the details that make a real difference — the performance, the user experience, the things that are harder to quantify but easier to feel when you’re using a well-built bespoke website.

Let’s Build Something That Works

If you’re thinking about a new website, a rebuild, or an ongoing development partnership, we’d love to talk about what that could look like for your business. Our team brings together the expertise to deliver something that genuinely works, and the tools to do it without unnecessary delays.

Get in touch with the Platform81 team today!