Developer finds AI tools helpful but not enough to skip months of real product work

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A developer building Infill, a browser extension that auto-fills repetitive web forms, used Claude and other AI coding tools throughout the project but still spent over three months completing it. While AI accelerated coding tasks like scaffolding, bug detection, and refactoring, the harder challenges involved edge cases, product decisions, and architectural trade-offs that AI could not resolve independently. An initial plan to use a large language model for all form-field matching was abandoned due to high API costs, latency concerns, and the privacy risk of sending sensitive user data to external providers. The developer instead built a deterministic local-matching system, with AI serving only as an optional fallback for unusual cases. The experience highlights that AI can speed up routine development work but critical decisions around data flow, privacy, and system design still require deliberate human judgment.

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