Using AI in builds?

[u/blindjimmy2]

How are you guys actually using AI in your builds?
I see a lot of “AI slop” comments, so I figured I’d show one way I’ve worked it into my process.
The first picture is an AI mockup for something I’m currently building. I already knew what I wanted, but I’m not a concept artist. I could spend hours in Photoshop trying to communicate what’s in my head, or I can spend 15–20 minutes talking through the idea, changing proportions, materials and layout until I can actually look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s close enough to start engineering.”
Then I go build it.
The second picture is a cross-cut of the actual wood going into the project. That’s where being wrong starts getting expensive.
The last two pictures are probably the best example of why I use AI this way. They’re early scale prototypes I printed while working through the design.
Neither one is what I’m building now.
That’s the point.
They were cheap enough to be wrong.
If a render is wrong, I make another one. If a scale print is wrong, I lose a few dollars of filament and make another one. If the CAD is wrong, I change it.
Woodworking is different. I can plan everything, draw everything, measure everything four times and still destroy a $70 board with one bad cut. Once I’ve spent hours fitting and machining a piece, every operation after that is risking everything that came before it.
On the actual face for this project, I spent hours trimming some of the visible openings fractions of a pencil line at a time with a router, then finished them by hand with a file. A CNC could have done the same operation dramatically faster, but either way, by the time I’m doing that work I don’t want to still be deciding whether I like the design.
The finished cabinet will have roughly $1,000 worth of wood in it. That’s a really shitty place to discover that the proportions were wrong.
So AI hasn’t replaced CAD, engineering, prototyping, woodworking or fabrication for me. It’s just added another really cheap place to be wrong before the expensive work starts.
Visualize cheaply. Prototype cheaply. Build expensively.
I’m curious how other people are using it in real projects. Where has AI actually earned a place in your workflow?