This is the end, isn’t ‘it?

When I got started in my career I called myself a web designer. I was fresh out of my MFA program and teaching part-time in an Interior Architecture department. I felt closer to design than technology at the time.

In those early days of web development, if you called yourself a “web designer” but didn’t write HTML and CSS (at least) you might find yourself snubbed. It was unfair, it was gatekeeping, but did encourage one to develop his skills. This is why I learned to code.

The days of the jacks-of-all-trades didn’t last. Roles became more specialized and visual design of websites became the role of experience designers using specialized design tools. Old-school web designers became web developers who became engineers. Engineers who could lead and talk to clients and other humans became directors. I became a Director of Technology.

With the field becoming more and more horizontal, more jobs were created and more space was created for Junior team members and the widening gulf between creative and technology created jobs to be done. Many junior engineers got started by translating visual designs into working code and figuring out how to deal with the gaps. Most visual design tools (inexplicably) do a very poor job of specifying the dynamic and fluid nature of the web. A junior engineer learned to test on different screens and go back to the designer and suggest “what about this?” when the visual design broke down in the face of reality.

However, today designers and product managers are increasingly using AI tools to visualize their designs as code, which is slowly eliminating a role for a junior engineer. With a little training, a willing and eager ”non-technical” person can learn to use version control tools like GitHub, create pull requests, and train their robot friend to respond to code reviews.

Generally, I think this is wonderful. I share in the delight and excitement a product manager feels when they see something abstract come to life. I like to see barriers between people come down. In a way, it’s like a return to the late 90s where the web was made by dedicated amateurs.

In another way, the field of web development is being hollowed out from the inside. The paths from junior to senior are being steadily replaced by automation. I think most web development will be replaced by automation eventually (and soon).

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this.

For a long time I’ve been baffled that custom web site development was still a thing at all. Why are we still doing this by hand? Why has there has never been a successful platform for building websites for medium to large businesses? Why isn’t there a Squarespace for Enterprise? Existing Enterprise platforms like Adobe Experience Manager still require a great deal of manual, custom development to get a website up and running. These platforms often require ongoing development support too. Strange that in the futuristic year of 2026 we’re still paying people to type angle brackets and curly braces to put things on the web. I’ve been making things on the web for about 25 years. I remember when I worked at a small advertising shop in the late 90s, any newspapers or print shops which still required analog film were already dinosaurs in the industry. When we made films for the dinosaurs to do their photo-litho process, the films were printed digitally. Even the dinosaurs had evolved. But the web has been stuck in this weirdly manual mode of development for 20 years.

Now Claude and his robot buddies are slowly (and then quickly) changing that whether the professionals in the field want it or not. My response to this has been “Yes. YES! NO! Not like that!”

I held out hope that the web development would modernize on its own. I have long entertained fantasies about cracking that nut - of making it possible to build a custom web site, that looked great, performed well, that integrated everything and everywhere, but didn’t require a 4-year degree to maintain. I thought the innovation would come in the form of well written and well designed software platforms. Instead, all of the difficult, tedious, manual coding and basic decision making was just automated away.

So this is what disruption feels like.