Web design is already a bloated mess. AI is just going to make things worse.

Yesterday I had a founder at my startup present a redesign of our app that they generated with AI. Then they used AI to create tickets/issues to implement it.

I hate working a little more every single day. The few bits that were still enjoyable are vanishing.

Great to read a CEO explain workers how this is really a terrific opportunity that they only need to “adapt” to. Ie., work harder for a smaller wage to make up for the competition with fully “AI” generated development.

I mean, it’s just heartwarming how this boss entirely fails to empathise with employees’ real concerns, and spews transparent bullshit to cover for the fact that there is no palpable difference between “AI” and shrinking budgets. Both will eventually cost jobs.

Web design died a long time ago, when everything became about frameworks. It’s more web engineering now.

Let’s face it: the IT industry since decades and decades is creating growth by adding layers of bullshit and security flaws plus their solutions - while creating a worse experience and scamming people out of ‘content’ (our creative lifeblood), attention and money. There’s however a growing number of people getting absolutely tired of their bullshit who want nothing more than talk to a real person, see real art, listen to real music, read text written by people … for those who are growing w(e)ary of IT a career change back into the tangible world might be worth considering. I spend more time gardening and drawing these days and fewer hours worrying about the latest tech trends and disruptive changes. Fuck your disruptions and let me enjoy my personal live stream of running water and some grazing sheep.

We’re seeing applications that can generate fully-built websites in seconds

That’s definitely true. But a lot of them are purple and almost all of them have a myriad of small glitches and rendering errors between different browsers and screen resolutions.

What’s really funny is that they asked a bunch of random CEOs and one of them is Harry Roper, a dude that seems to almost exclusively build his stuff with Lovable and claims to make $100k/month (source: himself). Of course this guy heavily drank the AI koolaid and produces horrible takes like these:

It allows you to create custom pages for people in a matter of seconds, helping to deliver a more unique experience for each customer

There’s nothing unique about websites designed by LLMs. For example: Two containers inside of a row with an image and some text have been built a million times, so of course the LLM can just reproduce this design. If you ask an LLM to create a button it will always look like Bootstrap. Tell it to build an accordion and it’ll also look like Bootstrap. Depending on how many tokens you’ve spent (or are allowed to spend) it might not even include the aria tags for accessibility, making it worse than Bootstrap.

So they cite some random CEOs - i.e. the people who don’t actually do the work - to prove that designers absolutely must adopt AI into their workflow to not get left behind - which is classical fearmongering.

In their minds, AI is “helping to deliver a more unique experience” or utilizes “frameworks and methodologies that we can run our teams and ourselves through”. But the matter of the fact is that the most unique designs are not built by talking to a chatbot and shoddily gluing components in a framework together. They are built by humans, by hand.

P.S.:

“As costs come down, this will become a by-product of marketing"

Are they, Harry? Are the costs really coming down? You’ll be up for a rude awakening when Lovable inevitably turns to token-based billing, just like everybody else. I hope you haven’t spent all of that cash already.

The adaption is a career change. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.