A piece in The New Stack argues that as more code gets written by machines, software engineers will split into two camps: those building the product a customer sees, and those building the tools and guardrails the first group uses. The prediction is that every software company ends up making developer tools whether it meant to or not.
This is a conversation happening inside large engineering organisations, and it has almost nothing to do with your booking form. But it does explain something you may already be noticing.
The article makes a point worth holding onto: faster code generation often just creates more friction later on. Code appears quickly, then somebody has to work out what the machine got wrong. In a big company, that problem gets solved by building shared rules and checks. In a one-person shop or a small agency, it gets solved by somebody actually reading the output, or it doesn't get solved at all.
So the practical version for you is not "is my developer using AI". Most are, to some degree, and that is fine. The practical version is whether there is a review step between the machine's output and your live site. Code that looks plausible and is subtly wrong is the failure mode here. It shows up as a contact form that submits but sends nothing, a checkout that works on desktop and quietly breaks on a phone, or a plugin update that takes the site down on a Saturday.
The other thing it points to is consistency. When work gets generated fast and nobody has agreed on how things should be done, you end up with four different ways of doing the same job across one website. That is not a crisis, but it makes every future change slower and more expensive, and you are the one paying for that.
What to do: nothing today. Next time you speak to whoever maintains your site, ask two things: what gets tested before a change goes live, and how quickly a bad change can be undone. You are not asking them to justify their tools. You are asking whether there is a safety net. If the answer is vague, that is the useful part.
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