Does AI Change What It Takes to Build Good Software?

Yes and no. Like any tool, what AI is worth depends entirely on who's holding it and what they know. Here are three things people often forget when asking whether they should use AI:

The Same Tools Are Available to Us, Too

Some costs really have come down. We are not going to pretend otherwise. A skilled developer who uses these tools well gets more done in a day than anyone could have imagined a few years ago. 

But if AI raises the ceiling for one capable person, it raises the ceiling for an experienced team even more. We have spent more than a decade building technology for Catholic organizations of every size. These AI tools build on that foundation rather than erasing it. 

So the fair comparison is not your team with AI versus our team doing things “the slow old way.” It is your team with AI compared to our team with AI, plus all the experience we accumulated before any of these tools showed up.

Picture a marathon. We're twenty miles in. We know the route, we've already made the rookie mistakes, and we've found our pace. Then everyone gets faster shoes, including your team back at the starting line. Faster shoes are wonderful, but they don't move the starting line. And when everyone has the same advantage, it’s no longer an edge.

A Tool and a Craft Are Not the Same Thing

When the power drill arrived, it did not turn everyone into a carpenter. It made experienced carpenters faster and gave inexperienced people who wanted to pretend they were carpenters a quicker way to make expensive mistakes. The tool changed the speed of the work. It did not eliminate the skill required to do the work well.

Want to tinker around and create something for your personal use? Go for it. Planning to DIY something your organization will rely on long term? Not a great idea.

A factory can stamp out a flat-pack bookshelf in minutes. A craftsman with a chisel makes the kind of thing a family keeps for fifty years. AI can produce the surface-level version of almost anything right now. Building something secure, durable, and genuinely fitted to your mission still rests on human judgment.

Software is no different. Hand the same project to a seasoned developer and to a beginner, and what each one builds will not be remotely alike. 

None of this is a knock on your team. A capable person with good tools can do real, valuable work! But no tool can substitute for experience in a craft. So unless your internal tech team has been building Catholic content-delivery apps for over a decade, you’ll still want to call Annunciate when you’re looking to create your own branded platform.

The Hardest Part Isn’t Writing the Code

Anyone can nail two boards together. Not everyone can build a choir loft that won't come crashing down when the whole parish packs into the church on Christmas Eve.

Software is full of choir lofts: load-bearing decisions that look simple from the pews. One of the most important parts of building good software is knowing how to design your investment so it will last.

Ask someone without much experience what a piece of software needs to do, and you will usually get a long list of shallow requirements. A few that actually matter will go unmentioned—requirements that would have changed the shape of the whole build. 

It takes an experienced engineer to know which questions to ask at this stage, see what is going to break before it happens, plan for future needs nobody thought to bring up, and design something that can grow as you grow. That is the real craft. The code is just the part you can see.

AI is a genuinely good executor. Point it at a clearly defined problem, and it will help solve it quickly. On its own, though, it does not carry the long view, the architecture, the trade-offs, or the judgment about what your organization will actually need two years from now. If you were building something meant to last, you would not just want the cheapest person who can lay bricks quickly. You would want an architect.

AI doesn't replace expertise. It multiplies it. Let our professional team put these tools to work for you!

Can’t We Just Build Our Own App with AI?

Coding an app is one thing. Running it is a separate job that never really ends. There is hosting, security, monitoring, and the part nobody enjoys: Who is on call when something breaks at 9pm on a Sunday? 

On top of that, Apple and Google revise their rules constantly across multiple countries. A build that is compliant today can fall out of compliance next quarter. Do it yourself, and your tech person is no longer moving your mission forward. They are running on a treadmill just to keep the thing online and approved.

This is exactly why we built Annunciate.

Annunciate is a white-label app platform created to help Catholic organizations deliver their content, their way. It gives you your own branded app for audiobooks, video, and ebooks. That way you keep ownership of your brand, your audience, and your revenue instead of signing all three over to Big Tech. 

Because we run Annunciate for many organizations at once, the cost per organization stays far lower than it would be for any single organization building and hosting alone. We handle the hosting and stand behind a 99% uptime commitment. We keep every client’s app current as the app-store rules shift. And because we are working across so many apps at the same time, we catch and fix most problems before users even notice them!

What It Actually Costs to Build and Maintain an App Yourself

We won’t lie to you. No matter how you go about building an app, it’s going to be expensive. But the do-it-yourself path is usually the more expensive one, not the cheaper one. 

Let’s look at the numbers:

Annunciate runs about $15k–25k per year. 

Your developer’s fully-loaded cost likely runs between $100k and 150k per year. 

If you built an app in-house, you would be asking this one person to create the software as well as own its security, uptime, monitoring, and every fix it will ever need—with no end date. All on top of their regular job.

Even with AI speeding things up for your team, building an app like Annunciate is not a fast process. You are likely looking at close to a year of development just to reach what we have already built and keep maintaining every day, and your developer’s time is expensive. You’ll quickly spend more on development hours than you would have spent on Annunciate.

By the time you have a DIY build ready to deploy, Annunciate will have even more features. Remember, our team has a four-year head start!

What Pope Leo XIV Says About AI and Human Work

For Catholic leaders, questions of when and how to use AI take on an added theological dimension. Thankfully, Mother Church is on top of things!

In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The Holy Father does not treat AI as an enemy. He presents it as a tool that can help heal, connect, and educate—or divide and generate new forms of injustice—depending on how we use it. 

The Holy Father calls us to act like Nehemiah, “placing God at the forefront of our actions and the human person at the center of our choices” (§16). We are to “lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace” (§15).

For a Catholic organization deciding how to build its technology, that reframes the whole question. It is not only “can AI build it?” but also “does the way we build honor the human person and their gifts?”

Putting your technology in the hands of seasoned experts who care about your mission is not the nostalgic option. In many cases, it is most in step with what the Church is actually asking of us and will produce the best results.

Building with AI for Your Catholic Mission

None of this is meant to talk you out of using AI internally. It can be a real gift that helps you do good work! 

But if you’re thinking it will replace a team of experts, think again. AI changes the speed of the work, not the skill it requires. A faster tool is still just a tool. It’s the expertise that makes it worth anything. 

Ask yourself if building and running your own app is the best use of your mission's time and money, or whether you'd rather hand that task to a team that already has the app built, keeps it running smoothly, and will pray for your mission every day. 

Still unsure whether building in-house or partnering with our team makes more sense for your organization? Schedule a no-commitment consultation. We want what’s best for your organization, so we are happy to run the numbers and help you figure out the best way forward. 5 Stones will be praying for your mission either way!