The changing landscape.

Well blimey! We are nearly a quarter of the way through the year and I have only just got around to writing one of these, so apologies for that but better late than never eh?

I thought I'd quickly talk about how the abundance of AI chatbots has changed the landscape of the web development world and how this has affected my day to day. Exciting stuff, so grab yourself a tissue in case of nosebleeds and we'll get straight to it!

My journey to becoming a web developer wasn’t exactly a straight line, I mean it’s not a requisite to work in hospitality for a decade and a half as the skillset isn’t necessarily transferable, however I suppose it may help the client facing side? I’ll let you decide. The reason I zagged from that trade into web development was in no small part due to Covid and the series of ineptitudes of that government, but this blog isn’t meant to be about that so I’ll try to refrain from eviscerating that particular set of bastards. Anyway it lead me from wanting to do something else that I could have complete control over, and having a short career in software engineering earlier in my life, I decided to see what the internet was up to. To begin with it was all rather overwhelming as the intervening years had rendered much of what I had known redundant, so I rolled up my sleeves and began again from scratch and after a while I felt proficient to offer a good value service to clients.

The whole point of this exercise was to be in full control of the design and building process so that should there be any problems/bugs/updates required I would know exactly how to implement the changes and be able to do so with maximum efficiency. For a short while this was exclusively how I worked and should a client want a squarespace or wix or insert-your-own-drag-and-drop-website-builder-type-thing updated or built I’d refer them to one of the many non coding types that specialise in dragging and dropping, and that was fine. That brings us to where the landscape has changed.

With the prevalence of AI services, both paid and free, the lone developer has a new type of customer to contend with; those that have got AI to build something and then wonder why it doesn’t work properly. Now this in of itself isn’t too much of an issue as work is work I suppose, but for some reason these potential clients seem to think that it shouldn’t really cost very much at all as the bulk of the work is done. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It almost always takes much, much longer to fix something you haven’t built and with AI literally amalgamating the coding styles of everything that it’s been trained on you can be sure that it’s going to be a mess in there. It reminds me of my electronics coursework at school, upon realising that I wasn’t going to complete my infra-red alarm system on time, I decided the only way I may still get favourable marks was by jamming all the wires, circuitry and components into the fairly well made casing and nailing it shut. I then wrote a complete fiction about potential reasons why it didn’t work at all and picked up pretty good marks. The code that AI writes is very much like that casing, it all looks good on the outside but when you pry those nails up you realise this isn’t the work of a superior intelligence, rather the chaotic hallucinations of a technological nutter.

So what does this all mean? Well as nothing jumps back into Pandora’s box I suppose we are stuck with AI with all of its marvellous potential and its irritations, and I’ll be happy to fix the splurges of code that it vomits out for a fair hourly rate! But if you want a better website you’re still better off asking a proper developer, if only we knew of one?

Well that is quite enough of that for one day, hope you are all excelling! Hurrah!