AI Usage

At Sveltopia, we bring over two decades of web development experience...serving small businesses, purpose-driven organizations, and Fortune 500 companies. Our expertise is design and UI engineering. Our passion is the developer community.

Our pillars: Minimal. Functional. Beautiful.

We build with AI as a core part of our process because:

• It gives us more time to focus on what we do best: thoughtful innovation, effective design, and elevated developer experience.
• When done responsibly, it compresses the distance between ideas and quality implementation.
• It's not going anywhere. If you have spent any time in web development, you know that part of the job description requires (wise) adaptation to new tools. The question for us was never whether to use AI; it was, and continues to be, how to use it rightly.

What we believe

• AI is a tool, not a replacement for human judgment. We use AI to research, process ideas, and execute tasks we could do ourselves, but appreciate that with the tool we can do it faster and with more readily available information. We take a "trust but verify" approach in our interactions with AI and are constantly evaluating how to improve our workflows.
• Every line of code is owned by us. We review everything we ship the way a tech lead reviews a developer's work: reading it, questioning it, often rewriting it. If it goes out with our name on it, we understand what it does and why.
• AI should raise the bar, not lower it. Faster implementation means more time for considering edge cases, honing documentation, and perfecting details. We hold AI-assisted work to a higher standard, and build in appropriate testing to back that up.
• "AI slop" is a process failure, not a tool failure. Poor output happens in the absence of skilled human attention. Taste, judgment, and experience are still what separate great work from garbage, and that will never change. We stay relentlessly in the loop.
• Craft still matters. Pixel-level decisions, typography, color, API design, the DX we'd want for ourselves...those responsibilities are still on us.
• We're still figuring it out. Things are moving fast. We've made mistakes. But these tenets are our foundation as we keep refining our process.

By way of example, this document was created through conversation with Claude...we used it to help organize our thoughts and capture the journey we've been on. The perspective and words are ours, and any resemblance to AI-speak is purely coincidental. (Note the lack of emojis and em dashes)