Leveraging AI as a Developer: Creating Developer Tools

A developer at Atomic Object reflects on using AI coding agents to build small, internal developer tools that were previously not worth the time investment. Because describing functionality and letting an agent build it takes minutes instead of hours, the cost-benefit calculation for building throwaway or niche tools has shifted, making it cheap to experiment, iterate, and even abandon tools that don't pan out. The piece frames this as a mindset shift where imagination rather than time becomes the constraint on internal tooling.