Transcription
Tell me if you've heard some of these headlines before: "Will AI affect the future web development jobs?" "Will websites like Claude be able to replace web developers?" "Do you think that services like Claude or ChatGPT will make web development die?" You've probably seen headlines like this all over the place. But what if I told you every single one of these headlines was actually 10 years old, and all I did was replace the word "WordPress" or "Wix" with "AI" or "ChatGPT"?
We have been through this over and over again, where a new technology comes out and everyone thinks it's going to replace web developers, or front-end developers, or programmers, and that there are no more jobs ever for web developers. But in reality, all that it's done throughout history has changed what the role of a front-end web developer looks like. It's removed some jobs, and it added other jobs, but in no circumstance has front-end web development, or just programming in general, ever been completely removed by these tools.
Let's jump all the way back to when WordPress was first released. WordPress essentially made it so that a non-technical user could create a decent-looking website with lots of functionality built into it relatively easy. It wasn't, you know, super, super easy, but compared to learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it was significantly easier. And it was really one of the only ways to create a website if you didn't have those technical skills.
People that were web developers were worried, "Oh, this WordPress thing is taking over all the sites I used to build." And yes, if all you built was very small, like brochure-style websites for companies or individuals that didn't have a very big budget, you were being replaced by WordPress. But what many people didn't realize when WordPress came out was that it would open up a massive amount of new styles of jobs for developers: creating WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, being WordPress experts – everything related to working and running WordPress sites now became its own category of jobs, tangential to all the normal front-end, back-end web development, and programming jobs out there.
Sure, it meant that someone whose sole job was creating those very simple websites was completely replaced and now essentially needed to find a new skill to create a job for them.
And when Squarespace and Wix came along, they did essentially the exact same thing, but instead of doing like a blog or something like that, it was now more geared towards like a brochure site for like a photographer or like a small business. These people now no longer needed to pay thousands of dollars for a web developer to create a site. They could just go on Squarespace, create something relatively simple, and have a good-looking website that they could show to people for 20 bucks a month, or whatever it cost.
Now again, if your sole job was creating brochure sites for small local businesses, you're essentially out of your job because now Squarespace and Wix can do that better than you can for cheaper price. But it also opened up new jobs and opportunities. There are now people that are Squarespace experts, Wix experts. There's people that customize themes, and so on. Just like the same thing happened with WordPress, the same exact thing happened with Squarespace.
And all the other jobs and things that were too complex for WordPress or Squarespace to do, they still have places where real developers are working full-time to create those products.
WordPress, for example, is very powerful, and you can do a ton of stuff with WordPress, but as soon as you try to get things too complicated, it becomes more difficult to work with WordPress, and it becomes easier to work with a team of developers that are going to build out this tool for you. Yes, it may be more expensive, but you're going to get a better end result.
Fast forward to modern-day times, we now have AI. And AI, I will say, is definitely way, way, way more powerful than WordPress or Wix or Squarespace. And it can do so much more than those particular tools. But it has a lot of the same trends that we're going to see going forward with AI.
Just like I was saying, if your job was to do something that was relatively simple, making simple small applications, AI can essentially do that just as good as you could, but they can do it way, way cheaper. So someone with relatively little to no technical experience can create those very simple applications themselves, post them up and have it working instead of needing to hire a developer for a few thousand dollars to do that. So those people that that is their sole job have now been essentially completely replaced.
But it is now opened up new opportunities that we will see throughout the coming years, where now we're going to have people that are experts in these AI tools to help non-technical people manage and work with these AI tools to build out the sites for themselves.
It doesn't matter how easy AI makes it for you to build a website, it is still going to be difficult enough that there are going to be people that don't want to spend the time troubleshooting and dealing with creating that themselves. So they're going to essentially look for someone to either do it for them or to help them through that process.
So if you're the person that is the expert in that field, which is a new field that did not exist before AI, you essentially have a job that did not exist before, even though certain previous jobs were replaced.
Now you instead may be worried about a more traditional front-end development job where you're working at a large company on a very large-scale project. And you're thinking, "Well, in that case, this AI is making me way more productive, so there's not need for nearly as many developers, and we don't even really need developers because, well, I can just have my project manager use a tool like Claude, and they can create the application and code themselves instead of outsourcing that to some developer that costs a ton of money."
And if that's your thought, I really question the type of project managers you've worked with in the past, because often times non-technical people that try to create technical things don't really understand a lot of the nuance that goes into how you form and create something technical, and what you can and cannot do.
So they may want to do something that is either impossible, incredibly difficult, or just not feasible for the particular system. But if they're not a technical user, they're not going to know that. So they're going to try to create that using their AI tool or whatever. They may be able to ham-fist something in there, but it's going to be terrible, probably bug-filled, and so on. And it's just not going to be ideal.
You need people that are technical problem-solvers to be able to understand how to use and implement features, even if they're not writing any of the code themselves. If AI is doing 100% of the code writing, you still need someone there to look at the code, understand what it's doing, and make sure the AI is doing the correct thing.
For example, do you trust a random project manager to understand all the different nuances of security inside of a banking application? Do you want to essentially relinquish all of your technical knowledge to an AI to create all of that security code for you when the person reviewing and looking at that code doesn't even know what code is or how it works? That is not something I'm comfortable with, and that's not something that many, many companies are going to be comfortable with either.
So they need people with those technical skills and know-how to be able to look at these things and say, "Okay, is this secure? Is this not secure? How can we implement this better?" And so on.
It doesn't matter how easy different technology, such as AI, makes something, there is always going to be someone that thinks it is too difficult, and they're going to want someone to help them along the way, or they're going to run into problems that they cannot solve with the tools, such as AI, that they have at their disposal.
In that case, you are always going to need experts or technical people that are developers and programmers to come in and actually solve these particular problems that are too difficult, too time-consuming, or are just plain impossible to do with the tool at hand, specifically in this example, AI.
And none of this even touches on how problematic having a non-technical person vibe code an entire application for a business enterprise scale can be.
If you want to learn more about the problems related to this, I have a full video covering that. I'll link right over here.