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 carrying the full weight of client delivery, production decisions, and repeated technical work is difficult.

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 a demanding agency project.

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 letting projects consume more energy than they should.

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 as extensions.

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 months

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

Projects where I worked sixteen hours a day.

Projects that took months.

Projects that left me physically exhausted.

But this project felt different.

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 made me a smarter developer and business owner

This is important.

AI suddenly made me a better developer and business owner.

It gave me more knowledge and points of views.

It gave me leverage.

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 time.

And I started thinking:

Maybe I actually can build this.

That mental shift was enormous.

For the first time, building my own tools felt realistic

After that project, something changed in my head.

For the first time in fifteen years, I could finally build my business systems.

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

Themerson is one of them.

AI did “save” me

I want to be clear here.

AI didn’t save my career.

But it did solved many of my problems.

It did turn me into a better developer and founder.

And yes, I’m still building, I’m still learning, I’m still making mistakes.

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

I don’t have enough time.

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 years I had ideas that I couldn’t execute.

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