We Use AI to Build Our AI Product — Here's What We Learned

At JetStack AI , we build AI-powered tools that help HubSpot teams migrate and manage their portal configurations. Ironically, AI is both our product and our most important development tool. Using AI to build software sounds like a solved problem in 2026. It isn't. Here's what AI-assisted development actually looks like — the real challenges, the hard-won lessons, and what nobody tells you about AI code generation in production. AI-Assisted Coding: The 80/20 Problem Everyone talks about AI-assisted coding like it's magic. "Just prompt it and ship." The reality is messier. AI is exceptional at getting you 80% of the way there, fast. Boilerplate, CRUD endpoints, test scaffolding, type definitions — tasks that used to eat hours now take minutes. We leaned into this hard and it genuinely accelerated our development velocity. But that last 20%? That's where the real software engineering work lives. AI Code Generation Fails on Domain-Specific Logic Our codebase deals with complex API behavio