How AI Finally Gave Me The Leverage To Build My Own Products

For a long time, I ignored AI.

Not because I thought it was useless.

Because I thought it wasn’t for me.

I wasn’t interested in becoming a prompt engineer.

I wasn’t interested in generating thousands of blog posts.

I wasn’t interested in spending my days chatting with a chatbot.

I was interested in building things.

And for a long time, I didn’t believe AI could help me do that.

I was wrong.

I always had ideas. I never had enough time.

For most of my career, my problem was never creativity.

If anything, I had too many ideas.

Products.

Tools.

Services.

Platforms.

Business models.

Every few weeks, I would have another idea that I wanted to build.

The problem was execution.

Building software takes time.

Building software while working ten or twelve hours per day for clients is almost impossible.

For years, I kept telling myself:

Once this project is finished, I’ll finally start building my own product.

Then another project arrived.

Then another.

Eventually, I realized that the problem wasn’t motivation.

The problem was leverage.

My first experience with AI felt disappointing

Like many developers, I tried ChatGPT when it first became popular.

I opened the browser.

I asked questions.

I generated snippets.

I experimented.

And honestly, I didn’t understand the hype.

The answers were interesting.

Sometimes useful.

Often wrong.

It felt like having a junior developer who talked too much and was occasionally very confident while being completely wrong.

After a while, I stopped using it.

I assumed that AI simply wasn’t useful for the kind of work I did.

Then one project changed everything

In late 2025, I accepted one of my last work for agencies.

It came from a foreign agency.

The project was complex.

It involved ecommerce, custom interactions, advanced frontend work, and a WebGL-based experience.

A few years earlier, a project like that would have terrified me.

Not because I couldn’t build it.

Because I knew exactly what it would cost me.

Months of work.

Late nights.

Stress.

Weekends.

Mental exhaustion.

At that point, I had already spent years sacrificing my life for projects.

I didn’t want to do it again.

So I decided to experiment.

I stopped using AI in the browser

Around that time, I discovered that AI was already inside IDEs.

Tools like Claude, Codex, and other coding agents were deeply integrated into development environments.

For the first time, I loved AI.

That moment changed everything.

Instead of asking AI to explain code, I started using it to help me write, refactor, debug, document, and explore solutions directly inside my editor.

The experience felt completely different.

I wasn’t talking to an assistant anymore.

I was working with leverage.

The project that should have taken six months

I remember thinking about previous projects that had consumed my life.

Projects where I worked sixteen hours a day.

Projects that took six months.

Projects that left me physically exhausted.

This project felt different.

Not because it was easier.

Because I wasn’t carrying the entire cognitive load alone anymore.

I still had to make decisions.

I still had to design the architecture.

I still had to validate everything.

But suddenly, many of the tasks that previously consumed hours now took minutes.

The project was completed in roughly two months.

A few years earlier, I wouldn’t have believed that was possible.

That’s when I realized what AI actually is

Most discussions about AI focus on replacement.

Will AI replace developers?

Will AI replace designers?

Will AI replace writers?

I think that’s the wrong question.

The question that changed my life was:

What happens if AI doesn’t replace me, but amplifies me?

That was the moment everything clicked.

AI wasn’t replacing my skills.

It was multiplying them.

The bottleneck had never been ideas.

The bottleneck had always been execution.

AI didn’t make me smarter

This is an important distinction.

AI didn’t suddenly make me a better developer.

It didn’t magically give me knowledge that I didn’t have.

What it gave me was speed.

Energy.

Momentum.

It removed enough friction that ideas which previously felt impossible suddenly felt realistic.

For the first time in my career, I stopped thinking:

I don’t have enough time.

And I started thinking:

Maybe I actually can build this.

That mental shift was enormous.

I don’t want to become an AI influencer

One thing that still feels strange to me is how many conversations about AI revolve around AI itself.

People talk about prompts.

Frameworks.

Agents.

Models.

Benchmarks.

I honestly don’t care very much about any of that.

I don’t wake up wanting to use AI.

I wake up wanting to build products.

AI is simply the best leverage tool I’ve ever had access to.

That’s it.

It’s a hammer.

A very powerful hammer.

But nobody builds houses because they love hammers.

They build houses because they want somewhere to live.

For the first time, building my own products felt realistic

After that project, something changed in my head.

Not because I suddenly became rich.

Not because all my problems disappeared.

Because for the first time in fifteen years, I could finally see a path.

The products I had been postponing for years suddenly looked possible.

Themerson.

A WordPress starting point.

A content abundance tool.

The ideas hadn’t changed.

My ability to execute them had.

And that’s what gave me hope.

AI didn’t save me

I want to be careful here.

AI didn’t save my career.

AI didn’t solve my problems.

AI didn’t magically turn me into a successful founder.

I’m still building.

I’m still learning.

I’m still making mistakes.

But AI did something extremely important.

It removed the excuse that I had been telling myself for years.

I don’t have enough time.

For the first time in my professional life, that sentence no longer felt true.

And honestly, that might have changed everything.

Final thoughts

People often ask me if AI will replace developers.

I don’t know.

Maybe some developers.

Maybe some jobs.

What I know is this:

For fifteen years, I had ideas that I couldn’t execute.

Today, I still have ideas, but I think better ones.

The difference is that now, for the first time, I believe I might actually be able to build them.

And that feeling is far more valuable than any AI tool.