People claiming "AI speed" for web builds are often just front loading their technical debt.
It’s easy to use AI to spin up a headless stack with Sanity or Storyblok, but you quickly run into the "Infrastructure Tax." You gain total freedom, but you’re now manually wiring up the SEO, form handling, and deployment pipelines that platforms like Webflow provide out of the box.
The reality? For high-velocity marketing sites, the "all in one" convenience of a coupled platform is still the gold standard for speed-to-market. The fact that we’re building tools just to make our code files feel like a visual editor proves that speed isn't just about how fast you can generate code…It's about how little you have to set up.
That said, Sanity or Storybook isn’t the enemy; it’s the heavy lifter. If you’re building a complex, data heavy web app that trade off is 100% worth it. But if you're over engineering a landing page just because an AI told you it was "cleaner," you aren't moving faster, you're just making it harder to ship.
Choose the tool for the job, not the hype.