There are two dishonest positions on this topic. One is the agency that quietly generates everything and charges as if a specialist laboured over it. The other is the craftsman who insists they never touch these tools while their delivery times say otherwise. Neither helps you decide who to hire.
Where we use it, openly
- First drafts. A blank page is expensive; a bad draft you can react to is cheap. Almost nothing survives to the final version unedited.
- Repetitive code — the boring hundred lines between the interesting five.
- Translation and rewriting, always reviewed by someone who speaks the language properly.
- Research and summarising, when the alternative is reading forty pages to find one number.
- Image and asset variations while exploring a direction, never in the final delivery unless you agreed to it.
Where we do not
The decisions. What to build and what to refuse to build. What the business actually sells versus what it says it sells. Which section to cut even though the client likes it. What a page should feel like. Which of three approaches will survive contact with real customers.
These are judgement calls made from having watched projects succeed and fail, and they are the entire reason you hire a person instead of buying a subscription. A model can produce something plausible for any of them. Plausible is exactly the problem — it is wrong in ways that look right until it has cost you three months.
The honest effect on price
These tools make us faster, so projects that used to take five weeks take three. We passed that on: prices came down and timelines shortened. What did not change is the number of hours spent on structure, decisions and review — because that is where the result is actually decided, and it is not compressible.
If someone quotes you a full website for a fraction of the market price with a two-day delivery, they are not more efficient. They are shipping the raw output, and you will find out on the day a customer reads it.
How to check what you are buying
- 1Ask directly which parts of the work involve AI. An honest answer is a good sign; a defensive one is not.
- 2Ask who reviews the output and what they change.
- 3Read the delivered text yourself, out loud. Generated copy that nobody edited reveals itself immediately.
- 4Ask what happens when something is wrong after launch — that answer tells you whether a person is genuinely behind the work.
A power tool makes a carpenter faster. It does not make one.
In short
- Drafts, boilerplate and research: yes. Decisions, structure and taste: no.
- Faster delivery should show up as shorter timelines, not as unreviewed output.
- Ask any studio directly where they use AI — the answer tells you a lot.
- Read what you are delivered, out loud. It is the fastest quality check there is.
Hamza El Ghad
Runs Step to Begin, a small studio in Tangier building websites, automation and video since 2019.
