I’m sure by now you’ve received the memo that’s going around. Web designers and web developers are toast! Finished! Done for!
AI is here and it’s one-shotting your entire career.
Is the hype real, though?
Have we really been one-shotted out of existence?
I don’t know about we, but some of you definitely have been.
Unfortunately, the people who need to hear this most are going to be the people who will find it too painful to accept.
I’ve Been Lecturing About Best Practices for Five Straight Years
When everyone else was publishing video after video teaching people how to cut corners and duct tape sites together with cheap page builders, I was busy rallying people around the idea of best practices, quality, and craftsmanship.
Over the course of five straight years, I published hundreds of hours of detailed trainings on web development with a strong focus on scalability, maintainability, and accessibility.
I talked about the importance of really knowing your craft, crossing your T’s, dotting your I’s and being a knowledgeable consultant instead of a pixel pusher.
What else did I lecture about?
Attracting higher quality clients, raising your rates, setting a project minimum, and doing more important work on more important projects.
When AI first came on the scene, I made it a point to very directly say: “This is going to replace the bottom rung of web designers and developers first.”
I very clearly remember saying (on multiple livestreams and interviews), “If all you can do is AI-quality work, there’s no need for you in the era of AI.”
And in that same vein, I noted that people doing sites at a sub $2500 price point were in grave danger.
And guess what?
The people who listened to me and implemented my suggestions are gonna be just fine and the people who didn’t are packing their bags.
What is AI Actually Capable Of?
Let’s start with base reality: If you’re not using AI in your workflow right now, you’re making a big mistake.
You’re not going to catch me publishing any prescriptions to avoid AI because it definitely isn’t something to resist or ignore. It’s something to leverage.
AI is legitimately impressive. It can spin up a decent landing page in seconds. It can write functional code. It can take a rough idea and turn it into something that actually renders in a browser.
For someone who just needs something up, that’s an empowering thing.
It’s also an incredible accelerator for people who actually know what they’re doing.
Need to scaffold a component? Easy. Need to draft some utility functions? Done. Need to brainstorm layouts or debug a tricky CSS issue? AI is your new pair programmer.
Skilled people who supplement their workflow with AI are getting more done in less time, and that’s a competitive advantage you can’t afford to leave on the table.
There’s a ceiling, though.
What AI generates is extremely generic.
It produces the most statistically average version of whatever you ask for. It’s not creative. It has no real artistic ability. And it really, really struggles with unique challenges.
At the end of the day, it’s nothing more than an insanely impressive regurgitation engine. If the thing you’re trying to do doesn’t already exist in some form, it can’t be regurgitated, and thus AI is very bad at it.
The problem with all this is simple. Higher value clients want and need solutions to specific, unique problems. They need deliverables that speak to their specific, unique audience, and that integrate with their specific, unique systems.
That’s tough for AI to manage.
Then there’s the stuff AI flat out cannot do.
It can’t sit on a discovery call and pull the real requirements out of a client who doesn’t know what they actually need.
It can’t make judgment calls about scope.
It can’t say “I know you asked for X, but based on what you told me about your business, you actually need Y.”
It can’t manage a project, navigate stakeholder politics, or be held accountable when something goes sideways.
It also can’t produce code at scale without lighting trust on fire.
If the project scope is small, it can be let loose to run its course. But as scale and risk-avoidance increase, the more sketchy AI gets.
The Truth is Hard to Swallow
AI is undoubtedly the most powerful tool that’s ever been handed to our industry.
Alone, though, all it can manage to do is output very average stuff for very average people with very average needs. And it can only do that if there are no real consequences.
Here’s the cold, hard truth: The people who are most impressed by AI, who most believe we’re all “cooked,” who are most embedded and engaged with the AI-Bro era, are the people who were producing the most average stuff to begin with (or nothing at all).
Imagine for a moment that you’re a C or D level player.
AI comes along and is able to one-shot C and D-level work.
How do you feel?
You’re impressed!
You’re also terrified!
For sure, you’re of the belief that “we’re all cooked.”
Right? How could you believe otherwise?
You’re also probably scrambling to figure out how to shift your service offerings because it’s obvious that you can’t keep shipping what AI can now one-shot.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that the world isn’t filled exclusively with C and D players. Nor is it filled exclusively with clients who need C and D level work.
The panic we’re seeing in the industry isn’t caused by AI. It’s caused by C and D players having a very predictable reaction to AI and then treating social media like a megaphone for their meltdown-disguised-as-prophecy.
The A and B players know the limitations of AI, know what higher caliber clients actually want and need, and fully understand that AI isn’t “one-shotting” any of it (or even getting close).
The A and B players know that agents have to be relentlessly babysat, and that the code they produce has to be verified by humans before being merged, which is a major bottleneck.
The A and B players know that higher caliber clients aren’t sitting around in their home office spinning up sites and apps with Claude Code. If they are, it’s throwaway prototype stuff that they’d scrap the very minute real money gets involved.
The A and B players know that things like humanity, art, creativity, personalization, passion, and personality consistently win over automation in all critical arenas.
I hate that this has to be so direct, but it’s true: when someone looks at the current state of AI and concludes that we’re cooked, that’s more of a personal confession than an industry-wide forecast.
What the Best Clients Are Actually Paying For
Here’s something that separates the people panicking from the people thriving, and it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding about what clients are buying.
The C and D players think clients are paying for a website or an app.
They’re not.
They never were.
Websites and applications are collections of deliverables. They’re the artifact that is born from a certain process.
It’s the process that clients are actually paying for. It’s the thinking. It’s the strategy. It’s the person across the table who understands their business well enough to make decisions they struggle to make on their own.
They’re paying for expertise.
Good clients want a human who can look at their situation, identify what’s actually going to move the needle, and then execute on that at a level they couldn’t get anywhere else.
They’re paying for the discovery call where you ask the question nobody else thought to ask. They’re paying for the moment where you push back on a bad idea and save them from themselves. They’re paying for the experience of working with someone who makes the entire project feel handled.
AI can’t do any of that. Not even close.
Not only that, AI still can’t automate the code part to any acceptable standard without intense human intervention.
This is what the “we’re cooked” crowd doesn’t understand.
They’ve been selling average quality deliverables this whole time. So, when a machine comes along that can produce average pages and average pixels for average people, of course they think the game is over. That’s the only game they knew how to play.
Meanwhile, the people who’ve been selling outcomes, expertise, and far-above-average solutions to complex problems with real stakes aren’t sweating at all.
AI didn’t create your vulnerability, it just exposed it.
What’s crazy is that I’ve been shining a spotlight on this exact same vulnerability since 2020. A lot of people listened and a lot of people relentlessly criticized me. I was called every name under the sun, including a “gatekeeper.”
Well guess what? AI is a big swinging gate and it’s gonna hit a lot of y’all in the ass on your way out.
What About the Future, Though?
The common rebuttal to my point of view is, “AI does C and D-level work right now, but soon it’ll produce A-caliber work.”
Let’s imagine a scenario where AI is able to do all the things an A-caliber programmer and engineer can do. This means that it can plan, build, and deploy without any real oversight in a way that can be trusted to the same degree as a human-coded project and that it isn’t astronomically more expensive.
This means that anyone with a decent concept and enough Claude credits can create a fully functional application or a full marketing website without any professional input on a modest budget.
Are we cooked at that point?
Not all of us, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. It takes us into many new territories and is heavily dependent on crystal balls and hopium.
Perhaps I’ll tackle that next. Stay tuned.