Why I removed the AI behind my dev tools (and kept the features that earned it)

I spent a week adding AI features to my developer tool suite. Natural language to regex. AI-powered SQL query explanations. The kind of features you'd expect in a 2026 product. They worked. Users could finally describe what they wanted in plain English and get a real answer back.

Then I ripped the AI out from under them.

Not the features themselves — some of them are still there, still labeled with the same Pro badge, still doing the same thing from the user's perspective. What changed is what runs behind the input box. The API calls to a remote LLM are gone. The features that survived are now powered by a few hundred lines of client-side pattern matching, and the features that couldn't survive that change are gone entirely.

This is the story of how that decision happened, why I think more solo developers should be making the same call, and the simple framework I now use before adding any new feature.

The setup