“Hey AI, build me a website.”
It’s a matter of time – probably months, before we get here. I’m surprise we’re not here already:
Prompt:
Build me a website based on the documents and images in this Google Drive folder. Make it accessible and usable on all devices. Make it an app users can pin to their phone. Add a text-to-voice feature on every page. Pull in my videos from YouTube and TikTok. Style it to be modern and make the styles easy to change later. Give it a robust back-end API for all the data. And an RSS feed for all users. I want to be ready for the future beyond rectangular screens. Please.
If I was in any product related to web hosting or code, I’d be building this right now. I’m sure someone is. I’m sure many are. I’ll be roughly -100% surprised when this drops from a major cloud provider or version control service or CMS within the next few months. Actually, I’d be shocked if it didn’t.
All the automations and frameworks and templates and tools already exist – have for a long time. We’ve been using them to build the modern web. All the back-end hooks and CLIs and CI integrations to do this with any major framework, using any major build process, served from any major host, with any integration, already exists.
All that’s needed is a sprinkling of AI for harmonization; to boot up a repo, spin up a virtual dev environment, pull the necessary dependencies, set up the configs to match user specs and keys, configure the setup, populate the components and styles and pages, run the build, and push it to the host.
And once the project is built, in-browser live visual editing with immediate code updates is also already here.
Builder.io has been close for a while. Cursor and Replit are almost there. Others are hot on their heels.
This isn’t a future prediction—it’s a future certainty. We are already here, we just haven’t realized it yet. Because nobody has pulled the pieces all the way together. Yet.
We built our processes for this moment – we just didn’t realize it.
Building modern websites required knowing frameworks and build processes and optimization and CI and serving strategies, and knowing how to put them together and make them sing. That was where developer expertise came in; In the cryptic knowing and intricate wiring together and alchemic configuration of the pieces to make up the whole. That was the gate. And we kept it closed by building more complex and streamlined developer experiences.
This, through a different lens, is AI project management. This is already possible – it just needs an interface and the right permissions.
This is what’s next. And for the web dev industry, it’ll be upending, revolutionary, a transmutation.
This is also coming for every other software dev field, it’ll just take a bit longer.
Devs will still have work, plenty of it. It’ll be different work. More demanding, and interesting, and challenging, and human work.
When AI makes coding and project management cheap, when throwaway software becomes ubiquitous and sufficient for the task, when one-size-fits-all becomes one-experience-for-every-user, the value of a skilled developer shifts – from coding and management to product design, and accessibility, and internationalization, and user experience, and data management, and privacy, and security, and serving the user the data and interaction they need, in their context, in their moment, at their convenience and control.
And all this at the end of the web as a screen-based platform where the same website serves every user.
Are you ready for what comes next?
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Cross-posted to LinkedIn.