Forget the Hype: AI Tools I Actually Use for Web Development

Had a project a few weeks back. A client needed a proof-of-concept for a new feature set, which meant spinning up a bunch of custom Gutenberg blocks. Fast. I handed it off to a junior dev on my team, a sharp guy, but I could see him getting bogged down in the details—the block.json boilerplate, the specific registration functions, all the scaffolding. Total mess.

My first instinct, the one baked in after 14+ years, was to tell him to just muscle through it. That’s how we learn, right? But he was burning hours on solved problems. I realized my old-school thinking was the bottleneck. We weren’t building character; we were wasting the client’s money. It was time to seriously look at some of these AI tools for web development that everyone’s talking about.

The AI Tools I Actually Kept Using

Look, you can find dozens of listicles out there—in fact, the idea for this post came from a pretty decent one over at the official WordPress.com blog. But most of them are just a laundry list. You don’t need eight tools. You need one or two that plug directly into your workflow without causing more friction. For me, it came down to a couple of code assistants.

The first was GitHub Copilot, right inside VS Code. Instead of the junior dev having to look up the exact syntax for `register_block_type`, he could just type a comment explaining what he needed. And here’s the kicker: it generated the whole PHP function for him. Instantly.

My initial thought was, “Okay, but the code is probably garbage.” And yeah, you have to watch it. You can’t just blindly accept everything. But for boilerplate and standard functions? It’s about 90% there. It gets the structure right, and you just have to guide it. For instance, we prompted it to create a basic block registration function and this is what it spat out:

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: BBioon Custom Blocks
 * Description: A plugin to register custom Gutenberg blocks.
 * Version: 1.0
 * Author: Ahmad Wael
 */

if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) {
    exit; // Exit if accessed directly.
}

/**
 * Register the custom block.
 */
function bbioon_register_custom_cta_block() {
    register_block_type( __DIR__ . '/build/cta-block' );
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_register_custom_cta_block' );

Is it perfect? No. But it saved the dev 15 minutes of looking up docs and typing. And those 15 minutes add up fast across a dozen blocks. Another tool we tried was Cursor, which is basically an IDE built around AI. It’s even better at understanding the context of the entire project, not just the file you’re in. Total lifesaver for refactoring or debugging across multiple files.

So, What’s the Point?

Here’s the deal. These AI tools aren’t going to replace experienced developers. They’re not going to architect a complex WooCommerce checkout flow or debug a race condition. But they are exceptionally good at eliminating the boring, repetitive parts of our job. They’re force multipliers. They let a junior dev punch above their weight and let a senior dev focus on the stuff that actually matters—the hard problems that clients pay us to solve.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.

The real takeaway is to stop thinking of them as a replacement for skill, and start seeing them as a tool to amplify it. Trust me on this. It changes how you approach the work.