A developer's take on when .ai domains actually help, when they hurt, and what nobody tells you about renewal pricing. You're shipping a dev tool. Maybe it's an AI wrapper, a code assistant, a CLI with some LLM plumbing under the hood. The product works. Now you need a domain. The .ai extension is right there. It's available. It looks clean. Everyone seems to be using it. Should you grab it? The honest answer: it depends on what problem the domain is solving For most devs building AI-native tools, .ai does one useful thing — it sets the right expectation before the user even loads the page. That pre-loaded context can save you a headline, a tagline, maybe an entire onboarding step. But "it looks modern" is not a technical reason to choose an extension. Let's break it down properly. What .ai actually affects (and what it doesn't) Branding and discoverability If your tool lives in AI-adjacent spaces — HuggingFace, Product Hunt, GitHub trending, Hacker News — .ai reads naturally.…