Tom Scott-Redford

A colleague mentioned, the other day, the idea of being able to generate a complete website in just ten minutes. The reference was made in passing during a wider discussion on AI, and while it wasn’t the main focus of the conversation, it stuck with me.

The idea is technically correct. You can easily prompt an LLM to generate the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of a website and populate it with content. On the surface, this could even be seen as a good thing, lowering the barriers to an own place on the Web for small businesses, non-profits, and individuals. A realisation of the original concept of the Web as an interactive medium for all.

But what are the alternatives to an AI generated website? For many, it is a Squarespace or Shopify site, customised from templates. For others, with more specific needs (and bigger budgets), it might mean hiring a web developer or agency. Both options involve humans writing and reviewing code at some point.

No business model has a divine right to exist, and with the Web especially, people have always been free to build their own sites: that’s one of the things that makes the Web beautiful as a platform. Yet, it is too easy to miss what we lose when we remove humans (the developers, information architects, copywriters, and more) from the work.

The process of building a website covers a lot more than writing some code. In fact, that might be the easiest part. The content and information architecture have to be thought out so that the site meets its business needs and the expectations of its visitors. The site has to be optimised (within ethical limits) for search engines and, increasingly, chatbots. The site has to be secure against common attacks and built such that it opens as few new vulnerabilities as possible. And, not least, the site has to be accessible to the broadest range of users, with a diversity of needs and ways of using the Web.

None of this just happens, especially for accessibility, which is poorly enough understood at the best of times. But all of this is why the original vision of the Web as that interactive medium has evolved over the years into our present Web profession. Hobbyists have a place in the biome of the Web, but for functional websites, a robust profession with standards and skills is critical. It is by no means a perfect profession, but it shouldn’t be put out to pasture because some billionaires want to make a little bit more money.

Because that is the danger for the profession: work goes to LLMs and the budgets go with it. Spending shifts to tokens instead of people. That hollows out the profession, which depletes the knowledge and skill in web development and, before you know it, HTML is the preserve of the sort of tech hobbyist who learns to code in Forth for fun. Along this path, the value of an entire industry is captured by tech giants (who are hoping compute gets radically cheaper by then).

This isn’t the future I want to see for the Web. A Web where anyone can ‘build’ a website with nothing but a subscription to Claude or ChatGPT is a Web that slides backwards compromising accessibility, usability, performance, and security. A Web profession that is deskilled is a Web profession that cannot innovate and invent the next generation of Web technologies. An AI Web will be little more than ossified and dying.