What to Do With Your Time Now That AI Is Doing All the Boring Stuff

AI has quietly taken over a lot of the work that used to just suck up all of our time.

• Developers used to spend hours on Stack Overflow looking up boilerplate code for a feature they'd already built ten times before.
• Designers spent hours in Figma pushing pixels around to match a picture already in their heads, just to find out their idea didn't match the rest of the team.
• Product managers spent hours writing imperfect user stories and then waited days or weeks for a story to turn into something they could play with, just to learn they wrote it wrong.

I don't think anyone would argue that most of these things have been dramatically improved by how we're working with AI. It's like it took away the boring parts of our jobs. But that means the hard part, the thinking, didn't go anywhere. We still have to do it. That's why they call it work.

So what should you do with the time you got back? Here are some suggestions for each team.

Developers: your new job is code the team can live with

AI can produce a lot of code fast. Your team doesn't need more output. It needs code the rest of the team can understand, extend, and safely change six months from now.

Spend the time you saved on review, architecture, and documentation. Explain the why, not just the what. Flag the shortcuts. Make the tradeoffs visible. One person with AI can reach a demo alone. A product is what happens when the whole team can pick up the code without reverse-engineering every decision. Working code and healthy code are not the same thing, and closing the gap between them is your new job.

Smaller tools worth a look:

• Superpowers: forces coding agents through a plan-first, TDD/BDD workflow. Token-heavy, but great for building something complex from scratch.
• CodeRabbit: AI code review that leaves line-by-line feedback on every PR.
• CodeScene: flags technical-debt hotspots and code-health decline before they slow the team down.
• Swimm: documentation that lives in the codebase and stays in sync as code changes.

Designers: your new job is knowing which direction is right

Generating ten directions before lunch is no longer the hard part. Knowing which one is right still is.

Spend the time you saved on real conversations with real users. Put a rough prototype in front of people and watch where they hesitate, misread, or give up. You don't need polished mockups to learn something useful. You need evidence. Shipping faster doesn't change how fast your users will tell you if you got it right.

Smaller tools worth a look:

• UserTesting: record real people using a rough prototype and hear their reactions, without standing up a research team.
• Maze: unmoderated tests on a rough prototype to see where people actually get stuck.
• Lyssna: quick five-second and preference tests when you just need a fast read.
• Optimal Workshop: card sorts and tree tests to check your structure matches how people think.

Product managers: your new job is clarity, not more stories

AI makes it faster to draft stories. Good. Spend that time pressure-testing them, not producing more of them.

Don't paste a wall of AI-generated text you can't be bothered to read yourself. Use AI to sharpen thinking you've already done, not to skip it.

You should know a story well enough to defend it in a room without scrolling. Before anyone writes code, lock down who it's for, what problem you're solving, and what success looks like. Edge cases, permissions, error states, and how you'll know it worked.

That's the product work, and when you skip it you don't save the cost. You move it downstream and pay engineering rates for product thinking.

Smaller tools worth a look:

• Vistaly: opportunity solution trees that keep discovery tied to an outcome.
• Cycle: pulls scattered customer feedback into one place so "who is this for" has evidence behind it.
• Statsig: ship behind experiments so you can actually tell whether it moved the metric.
• AppFollow: monitor app store ratings and reviews so shifts in user sentiment don't slip past you.

The pattern

Notice what all three have in common. The boring stuff AI took was the typing. The work that's left is the thinking: judgment, evidence, and clarity. That work was always the point. It just used to be buried.

If you're figuring out where to reinvest on your own team, we'd love to compare notes. Also! If you have a tool that you like that's not on the list, let me know and we will add it!