8 ms·

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's still experimental). She just provides the current website, tells how she wants it to look and it works great. I mean it's obviously ai generated but she gets quick results and is able to tweek things to look better by just telling deepseek what to do. She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. This is a simple example. Basically it's one of those earlier jobs that you could get someone to bid on for $x but now you can do yourself for $20.

latchkey 13d ago
i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough. the fact that your wife can be productive at lower cost means that more products will be built and more opportunities will be made. instead of spending money on website design, her business can spend money developing biotech. i welcome that, even if it means that things will change from the past and those that have made a career out of charging thousands will get replaced by a $20/month subscription.
- throwayay4929 13d ago
  Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI
  - latchkey 13d ago
    no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing. i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written. from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid of quickbooks because yesterday it was down and i couldn't log into it. figure out what i'm using there and present me an interface that allows me to do whatever i'm doing in quickbooks, but with my existing data from stripe, deel and mercury." it then dutifully went off and built me that app and now i'm running it in parallel and synchronized with quickbooks, until i feel that i can just turn that off. it is customized exactly to my business workflow and easily maintained with full unit tests. it costs me nothing but a $200/mo codex subscription and a few hours of work.
    - g00zzy 9d ago
      [dead]
  - Gualdrapo 13d ago
    FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that. Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result. But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots of unreliable and unoptimized code that will go live if you don't know what they're doing under the hood and can potentially cause issues in the future. Remember that all this tools do are sorts of interpolation. I've seen lately lots of "modern" websites with tons layers of !important in their CSS and who knows the monstrosities that they have with their JS. Meanwhile I and all people like me still don't have a job because all of this and the alleged "thousands" I was getting for doing this things.
    - latchkey 13d ago
      the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that. the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic job at that. that is what the OP was talking about in his article. you don't have a job because you're not adapting to this new world order quickly enough. i predict that there will be insane demand for porting existing applications off these over priced SASS contracts and building tailored products for businesses. as much as they are trying to convince people, you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model and can envision a better solution to the actual problem out of thin air. i'm burning 500m+ tokens a day on a $200/mo subscription. it is creating 10000x more value for me. it is no longer how much you know HTML/CSS, it is how well you know how to get AI to do what you want it to do and the only way to develop that skill, is to do it.
jonathanlydall 13d ago
My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website. I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded. Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times. But overall it was super empowering for her.
- Wowfunhappy 13d ago
  Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.
  - thaumasiotes 13d ago
    Does updating the website bring in additional money?
    - jonathanlydall 13d ago
      Only minimally, after 20 years of practicing word of mouth does 99% of the work.
    - Wowfunhappy 13d ago
      Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?
      - thaumasiotes 13d ago
        > Otherwise why update the website at all? Because you have it.
      - bayindirh 13d ago
        Changing office address? New qualifications? Better copy?
xyst 13d ago
show us these "corporate websites"
- comrade1234 13d ago
  That was just part of her work. She was employee #11 at a now $4.5B biotech company so everyone that early on had to do everything. She worked for Novartis, for booz allen, and others. She usually hired McKinsey consultants for projects but the web stuff was for smaller companies. She managed a team in India for one of her companies that took care of the web stuff. Basically just look at any top-10 Pharma or government website and you might see what she managed.
  - patcon 13d ago
    I choose to imagine that you guys are like a cute "opposites attract" Marxist x capitalist power-couple :)
snakeboy 13d ago
> She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted.
- comrade1234 13d ago
  Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.
  - dijksterhuis 13d ago
    will not not necessarily be true for AI generated works in all territories https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041
    - wccrawford 12d ago
      If nobody owns the work, then nobody can stop you from changing it, either.
      - dijksterhuis 12d ago
        if nobody owns the work, then anyone can take it from you.
  - Chaosvex 13d ago
    It's generally a little more complicated than that. Not up to writing paragraphs about it so I'll just leave this as a note so anybody that's interested can do their own research.
  - gamblor956 13d ago
    That's only true if the picture was specifically commissioned by the company. If it's a stock image or a licensed image, they need a license to alter the original image.
technion 13d ago
Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks.
- reaperducer 13d ago
  Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks. You mean the very web sites that the "AI" trained on? If you think AI can't make buggy code, there are several dozen thousand comments on HN that disagree.
  - technion 13d ago
    Ai cant make a static HTML page sitting on something like cloudflare pages have an rce bug.
- kajman 13d ago
  Maybe, but what about when "Claude do this" picks WordPress for someone that doesn't know what a reverse shell is?
  - oefrha 13d ago
    Still a win. Claude loves to write code from scratch instead of searching the web and pulling in dependencies, so you’ll likely end up with fewer garbage tier plugins written by people whose average skill level is put to shame by bootcamp grads; those people don’t know what a reverse shell is either.
    - archagon 12d ago
      So… similar levels of garbage code, but with no eyes looking at it.
- easyThrowaway 13d ago
dostick 13d ago
She wouldn’t be able to do any of that without you setting it up first. She would not know anything about deepseek, meaning of a folder with index.html file. Would not know even what to ask ChatGPT, “I need a website”? You make it sound like easy task anyone can do, when you provided 99% of otherwise impossible for them to easily obtain key knowledge needed.
- mplewis 13d ago
  you can literally do that to chatgpt
  - theendisney 13d ago
    Haha, yes. Can have it code a webserver from scratch on a disposable vape. Should be quite theraputic.
- oefrha 13d ago
  Any idiot can spend one minute now to acquire this amazing knowledge that you can just ask ChatGPT “I need a website”. If they don’t know now, sooner or later they’ll know from a short TikTok or something in the next couple of months/years. Not to mention AI companies are spending $$$ on ads to raise awareness; professionals already know they can create slides with LLMs, literally nothing’s different when it comes to most content websites. Yes, it’s an easy task any idiot can do. Head in sand, pretending it’s some sort of $10k for knowing where to hit situation isn’t going to reverse the trend.
  - nozzlegear 13d ago
    You're not accounting for how deeply unpopular AI is with the general public. Would anyone be making those TikTok videos in the first place? Would OP's wife want to use AI if he wasn't there to advocate it?
    - oefrha 13d ago
      Given that my nontechnical coworker has shared quite a few of these TikToks/Google Shorts with me, yes tons of people are making them. I don’t know what kind of alternative reality you live in, you can just go to any social media site and search for “create website with ChatGPT” etc. and check the view counts. Plus the context here isn’t any random person, but people who intend to pay for website development for their businesses.
adamredwoods 13d ago
The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. And if something doesn't quite work out, who's the backup? For small shops and startups, this probably doesn't matter. For mission critical sites, who's more dependable? AI is a tool, that's all it is.
- hadlock 11d ago
  >The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. There is still a cost to the business owner, they have to find a place to hire a freelancer, interview and then explain what problem they need solved, go through several iterations with them (either via meeting or email, or both) etc etc. If you're a small business that's not setting up an online storefront, the time spent setting it up and building it yourself is possibly less time. And then there's the bigger headache: what happens when the freelancer stops returning your calls? For the average small business website/page it is 2-10 pages. The average business owner can probably crank out that site with AI in less time than setting up a single interview.
znpy 12d ago
Yeah i have a similar experience. I’m essentially a sysadmin and i don’t do much programming and i always kept myself as far as possible from frontend development. And yet now with AI (chatgpt codex in my case) i can make useful little apps without ever looking at what kind of html/javascript gets generated. I’ll be honest: my agents.md explicitly states to use vanilla javascript and plain bootstrap for frontend, in case i might have to look at it in the future, but so far i’ve never had that need.

latchkey 13d ago

i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough. the fact that your wife can be productive at lower cost means that more products will be built and more opportunities will be made. instead of spending money on website design, her business can spend money developing biotech. i welcome that, even if it means that things will change from the past and those that have made a career out of charging thousands will get replaced by a $20/month subscription.

throwayay4929 13d ago
Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI
- latchkey 13d ago
  no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing. i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written. from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid of quickbooks because yesterday it was down and i couldn't log into it. figure out what i'm using there and present me an interface that allows me to do whatever i'm doing in quickbooks, but with my existing data from stripe, deel and mercury." it then dutifully went off and built me that app and now i'm running it in parallel and synchronized with quickbooks, until i feel that i can just turn that off. it is customized exactly to my business workflow and easily maintained with full unit tests. it costs me nothing but a $200/mo codex subscription and a few hours of work.
  - g00zzy 9d ago
    [dead]
- Gualdrapo 13d ago
  FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that. Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result. But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots of unreliable and unoptimized code that will go live if you don't know what they're doing under the hood and can potentially cause issues in the future. Remember that all this tools do are sorts of interpolation. I've seen lately lots of "modern" websites with tons layers of !important in their CSS and who knows the monstrosities that they have with their JS. Meanwhile I and all people like me still don't have a job because all of this and the alleged "thousands" I was getting for doing this things.
  - latchkey 13d ago
    the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that. the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic job at that. that is what the OP was talking about in his article. you don't have a job because you're not adapting to this new world order quickly enough. i predict that there will be insane demand for porting existing applications off these over priced SASS contracts and building tailored products for businesses. as much as they are trying to convince people, you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model and can envision a better solution to the actual problem out of thin air. i'm burning 500m+ tokens a day on a $200/mo subscription. it is creating 10000x more value for me. it is no longer how much you know HTML/CSS, it is how well you know how to get AI to do what you want it to do and the only way to develop that skill, is to do it.

jonathanlydall 13d ago

My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website. I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded. Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times. But overall it was super empowering for her.

Wowfunhappy 13d ago
Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.
- thaumasiotes 13d ago
  Does updating the website bring in additional money?
  - jonathanlydall 13d ago
    Only minimally, after 20 years of practicing word of mouth does 99% of the work.
  - Wowfunhappy 13d ago
    Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?
    - thaumasiotes 13d ago
      > Otherwise why update the website at all? Because you have it.
    - bayindirh 13d ago
      Changing office address? New qualifications? Better copy?

xyst 13d ago

show us these "corporate websites"

comrade1234 13d ago
That was just part of her work. She was employee #11 at a now $4.5B biotech company so everyone that early on had to do everything. She worked for Novartis, for booz allen, and others. She usually hired McKinsey consultants for projects but the web stuff was for smaller companies. She managed a team in India for one of her companies that took care of the web stuff. Basically just look at any top-10 Pharma or government website and you might see what she managed.
- patcon 13d ago
  I choose to imagine that you guys are like a cute "opposites attract" Marxist x capitalist power-couple :)

snakeboy 13d ago

> She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted.

comrade1234 13d ago
Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.
- dijksterhuis 13d ago
  will not not necessarily be true for AI generated works in all territories https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041
  - wccrawford 12d ago
    If nobody owns the work, then nobody can stop you from changing it, either.
    - dijksterhuis 12d ago
      if nobody owns the work, then anyone can take it from you.
- Chaosvex 13d ago
  It's generally a little more complicated than that. Not up to writing paragraphs about it so I'll just leave this as a note so anybody that's interested can do their own research.
- gamblor956 13d ago
  That's only true if the picture was specifically commissioned by the company. If it's a stock image or a licensed image, they need a license to alter the original image.

technion 13d ago

Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks.

reaperducer 13d ago
Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks. You mean the very web sites that the "AI" trained on? If you think AI can't make buggy code, there are several dozen thousand comments on HN that disagree.
- technion 13d ago
  Ai cant make a static HTML page sitting on something like cloudflare pages have an rce bug.
kajman 13d ago
Maybe, but what about when "Claude do this" picks WordPress for someone that doesn't know what a reverse shell is?
- oefrha 13d ago
  Still a win. Claude loves to write code from scratch instead of searching the web and pulling in dependencies, so you’ll likely end up with fewer garbage tier plugins written by people whose average skill level is put to shame by bootcamp grads; those people don’t know what a reverse shell is either.
  - archagon 12d ago
    So… similar levels of garbage code, but with no eyes looking at it.
easyThrowaway 13d ago

dostick 13d ago

She wouldn’t be able to do any of that without you setting it up first. She would not know anything about deepseek, meaning of a folder with index.html file. Would not know even what to ask ChatGPT, “I need a website”? You make it sound like easy task anyone can do, when you provided 99% of otherwise impossible for them to easily obtain key knowledge needed.

mplewis 13d ago
you can literally do that to chatgpt
- theendisney 13d ago
  Haha, yes. Can have it code a webserver from scratch on a disposable vape. Should be quite theraputic.
oefrha 13d ago
Any idiot can spend one minute now to acquire this amazing knowledge that you can just ask ChatGPT “I need a website”. If they don’t know now, sooner or later they’ll know from a short TikTok or something in the next couple of months/years. Not to mention AI companies are spending $$$ on ads to raise awareness; professionals already know they can create slides with LLMs, literally nothing’s different when it comes to most content websites. Yes, it’s an easy task any idiot can do. Head in sand, pretending it’s some sort of $10k for knowing where to hit situation isn’t going to reverse the trend.
- nozzlegear 13d ago
  You're not accounting for how deeply unpopular AI is with the general public. Would anyone be making those TikTok videos in the first place? Would OP's wife want to use AI if he wasn't there to advocate it?
  - oefrha 13d ago
    Given that my nontechnical coworker has shared quite a few of these TikToks/Google Shorts with me, yes tons of people are making them. I don’t know what kind of alternative reality you live in, you can just go to any social media site and search for “create website with ChatGPT” etc. and check the view counts. Plus the context here isn’t any random person, but people who intend to pay for website development for their businesses.

adamredwoods 13d ago

The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. And if something doesn't quite work out, who's the backup? For small shops and startups, this probably doesn't matter. For mission critical sites, who's more dependable? AI is a tool, that's all it is.

hadlock 11d ago
>The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. There is still a cost to the business owner, they have to find a place to hire a freelancer, interview and then explain what problem they need solved, go through several iterations with them (either via meeting or email, or both) etc etc. If you're a small business that's not setting up an online storefront, the time spent setting it up and building it yourself is possibly less time. And then there's the bigger headache: what happens when the freelancer stops returning your calls? For the average small business website/page it is 2-10 pages. The average business owner can probably crank out that site with AI in less time than setting up a single interview.

znpy 12d ago

Yeah i have a similar experience. I’m essentially a sysadmin and i don’t do much programming and i always kept myself as far as possible from frontend development. And yet now with AI (chatgpt codex in my case) i can make useful little apps without ever looking at what kind of html/javascript gets generated. I’ll be honest: my agents.md explicitly states to use vanilla javascript and plain bootstrap for frontend, in case i might have to look at it in the future, but so far i’ve never had that need.