How I use AI, and what I check by hand

A plain answer to a question more clients are asking. Last updated 12 September 2026.

The short version

I use AI tools in parts of my work. I say so up front rather than bury it, because it is how modern design and development work actually gets done — and because if you found out later, you would rightly wonder what else I hadn’t mentioned. This page is the whole answer.

Where AI tools show up in my work

• Drafting and editing copy. First drafts of page text, headline options, and rewrites for clarity. The facts, the voice, and the final wording are mine and yours.
• Code scaffolding. Boilerplate, layout starting points, and repetitive markup. I read, edit, and test every line that ships.
• Research summaries. Pulling together what a search engine or an AI assistant currently says about a business, a trade, or a neighborhood, before I verify it myself.
• Quality checks. A second pass for broken links, accessibility problems, and inconsistencies, on top of the manual pass I do anyway.

Three commitments

• A human directs and reviews everything. Nothing reaches you without being read, edited, and approved by me, Jake Chaney. Names, figures, claims, and citations are checked independently before delivery.
• Accountability does not shift. RVA Digital Works is responsible for the accuracy, originality, and fitness of every deliverable, whatever tools were used to produce it. “The AI wrote it” is never an answer I will give you.
• You own the work. Copy, designs, and code are assigned to you on final payment, as your agreement says. Tool use creates no third-party claim on your deliverables.

What I check by hand, every time

• Every phone number, address, hour, price, and license number on your site, against your source, not a draft.
• Every claim about your business (“family-owned since 1982,” “licensed and insured”) — if I can’t confirm it, it comes out until you confirm it.
• Every page on a phone, with a keyboard only, and with a screen reader, before launch.
• Every number I publish about the Richmond market, against the published dataset and methodology it came from.

What I don’t do

• I don’t submit your confidential materials — customer lists, financials, internal documents — to AI tools, and nothing of yours is used to train anyone’s model.
• I don’t generate fake reviews, fake testimonials, or stock “team” photos of people who don’t exist. The reviews on this site are real, named, and on Google.
• I don’t promise “100% human-written.” Nobody in this industry can honestly promise that anymore, and a provenance marker in text says nothing about quality, originality, or authorship.

If your organization has a policy

Some clients — government, healthcare, regulated industries — restrict AI use in vendor work product. Tell me before we start and I will scope the project to your policy, in writing, and keep a per-section record so any certification you need is a lookup, not a reconstruction.

This site, too

The same rules apply to rvadigitalworks.com. AI tools helped draft parts of it; I wrote, checked, and stand behind every claim on it, and the things I couldn’t source, I took down. If you spot something that doesn’t hold up, email me and I’ll fix it or explain it.

Questions

jake@rvadigitalworks.com or (804) 608-6508. I’d rather answer this on a call than have you wonder.