What about the web developers?

First came Wordpress. Did this crash the demand for web developers? No. It created a platform and marketplace for more sites to be built. More developers joined the space because of Wordpress or other Content Management Systems (CMS). Then came Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace with cloud-hosted solutions with accessible website and commerce building tools. Did this crash the demand for web developers? No, not really.

Cloud-hosted site builders let businesses skip the burdensome step of paying a freelancer a thousand plus to represent themselves on the internet. Many small businesses that serve a local or niche community need only enough to show up on Facebook and Google. That online thing is a distraction to running a business. They’re focused on customers, hiring, and sourcing their resources. As a result, cloud-hosted site builders did displace some freelancers for fledgeling businesses and sole proprieters.

If Wix existed when I was a teen, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity or meager funding to practice web development.

Once a small business grows to where it needs a better representation online, then a developer will be pulled in to do a better job. Instead of developing it from scratch, they need to deliver it economically. Once released, the owner might not want to update it for another few years. For that reason, and within those constraints, it is typically redone in Wordpress, or a site builder, to represent the brand while leaving the non-technical owner some accessible controls to edit their site's content at any time.

They might also contract or sub-contract a marketing team to contribute copy, flavor text, source some images, and otherwise decorate the online brand without the owner nit-picking or reviewing every detail. There will be some inaccuracies, but this won’t influence customer behavior much.

Copy, in the context of publishing (which includes websites), refers to the content (text and graphics) reproduced for others to see.

Once the business grows again, it will be redone with a bespoke solution by web developers that attend to it over the business's lifetime. Over the years, the team may be contracted months apart to maintain it, and that's fine. Their team knows how to manage the bespoke machine this business needs and the marketing team involved is more in touch with reality at this stage.

Wordpress and site builders raise the minimum business size from a sole proprietor to one with more than $40,000 of revenue per month. The businesses that succeed will need technology to represent themselves.

That’s a rather arbitrary figure!

I figure that paying at least eight part time staff, rent, resources, and your own benefits would at least need that much money each month going in, around, and out.

That vibe coding thing

What about lovable and other AI tools?

Cloud-hosted AI-site builders are sandwiched somewhere between Wordpress and pre-AI site builders in their target demographic. AI-site builders are like having a small contractor that sets up a CMS and fill it with copy, but cheaper.

At first it’ll please the business owner, who feels great having only spent $200 instead of $2000. But, will they stand out over their competition using Wix? A smidge, maybe? Customers don't care, though. Their service, their products, their pricing, ease of transaction, and accessibility are what matter.

By using site builders of any kind, that money saved is available for other uses that customers actually respond to. Though, customers may be confused as to why parts of the website are horribly wrong.

Lovable and other cloud-hosted AI-site builders will displace some of the low-value contracts.

How about the other AI thing? That vibe coding one? It’s a little different.

If a small business cannot safely self-host Wordpress – which they cannot – why should they try to self-host generated code? Vibe coding tends to produce a Next.js app, which isn't trivial to deploy and operate on your own infrastructure.

Keep in mind, technologists, most small businesses don't have that guy who can set up infrastructure and deploy code.

It gets easier when you look to use a serverless provider like Vercel, which owns Next.js. But a variable cost between $5 and a surprise $3000 bill would prompt any vibe coder to abandon the abyssal spaghetti they spawned.

I've evaluated Next.js across multiple projects – both at work and for a furry convention. My opinions are not compatible with Vercel. My frontend should not take more memory at idle than my backend.

Vibe coding to production with ones own infrastructure is just not realistic for the non-technical person. It is too difficult to consider viable.

Web developers will use them too

Small businesses will try out AI-site builders as long as the subscription costs are predictable and capped. They prolong a business's runway of self-reliance until they need to involve experts. When their needs are better understood and they have the money to pay a team for their work, they'll engage with experienced people.

That said, it is likely that these contract teams will use generative tech and site builders to produce the next long term revision of a business’s online presentation. That’s fine, since they know the domain. It means they can take on more work concurrently without growing staff. Whether the results are pleasant or long-lasting is another matter entirely.

I’ve seen my place take on contract work with non-technical businesses to represent them online while integrating with our business. Several times. They always churn after a year or two once the contract ends.

I can say the product their next contract made is inferior, but their customers haven’t changed before, during, or after our work. So is the business in the wrong for switching away to something cheaper? No.

What a waste of our time though. Internally we always plan like it’s going to be in place for five years and it flops before two. We haven’t done that for a few years now, thankfully.

Generative tech will not significantly displace web developers through use by non-developers. Exports with generative tech will be able to price out those that don’t and it will appear more crowded for a while. Some will be displaced because the demand is now met with less supply at the business size that needs web developers.

We’ll have a worse web as more slop-sites come to be through people that know better. But the market doesn’t care what the quality is, so long as there’s more of it.