[iamphilrae]

The rise of website builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify has drastically changed the web design and development industry. As a co-founder and lead developer of a small design/development team, I loved my job and was passionate about creating beautiful and functional websites. However, as more and more clients turned to these DIY platforms, I found it increasingly difficult to justify our higher prices. While our work was more sophisticated and better optimized for SEO, clients often didn't see the value in paying £10,000 or more for it.

Ultimately, I realized that our trade had become commoditized, and I made the difficult decision to sell the business and move on. I transitioned to a new role as a Product Manager, and over the years, I've climbed the ranks to become a CTO at a scaling startup. Although I miss the thrill of being a developer and creating websites from scratch, I've found new challenges and fulfillment in my current position.

If you're facing a similar situation, I'd suggest exploring other avenues to keep your passion for development alive. Consider taking on side projects as a hobby, collaborating with industry friends to start an indie project, or even teaching others about web development. Just be sure to carefully review any non-compete agreements with your current employer before pursuing any new ventures. Remember, although your job may have changed, your passion for creating great websites can still thrive in new ways.

[prawn]

It's not just that the budgets are harder to justify; it's also that prospective clients consider themselves to be experts. Having your judgement and expertise consistently overruled is disheartening and you often end up just following instructions, sapping any joy from the (diminishing and cheaper) role.

I started my web business 25 years ago. 5ish years ago I started photographing and filming travel content, primarily with a drone. More fun, more interesting, better feedback, etc. When building my own web projects though, I still love it.

[echelon]

No. It's that the job to be done is to sell product.

Not build a handcrafted website. Not build a beautiful website.

Provide something that markets and sells something to customers.

And with that perspective, the client really does know better.

The web is ephemeral. Will it even still exist in twenty five years after AI provides all the answers and connections (all we use the web for anyway)?

[JumpCrisscross]

In many cases, the client is right. I remember a college buddy who designed websites complaining about a problem client. Apparently he wrote their site in Silverlight, and the restaurant wasn’t thrilled someone had to download a plug-in to see their hours.

[ProllyInfamous]

LOL my first "production" website was made around 1997/8 and it required people to install FLASH — not a hit, and no traffic either — because I just wanted it to have this certain featureset =P

[kashunstva]

> the client really does know better.

really _may_ know better.

Some have very skewed notions about UI/UX that don’t conform to how most users (and pertinently, their customers) use web apps; but they will insist on it.

[deanCommie]

You're not wrong.

That is what the web has become. A platform to selling products.

But why did it have to be so? Why couldn't it also have been a medium for expressing beauty?

It still HOSTS a lot of art - art in the form of images.

But the number of truly beautiful artistic WEBSITES - in CSS, HTML, etc, are few and far between.

Hell, I remember the heyday of Flash - before Apple smothered it. There were some INCREDIBLY gorgeous websites with absolutely incredible animations and visuals.

Of course they were dogshit for accessibility, discoverability, information presentation, etc. Not to mention the apalling security/performance of Flash. So I don't wish the whole web was like that.

But we did lose something.

[prawn]

Some may know better for very specific parts of their business, but in the majority of cases, I would say they do not. More often than not, they're the ones pushing for some overwrought site with scrolljacking and needless animation or side-scrolling and the like.

The gripes about web sites you see on HN - they're the things clients insist on.

[jrochkind1]

I think the effect on the job market of (things like) midjourney is much more drastic and steeply immediate than that historical example (not sure if it's a true story or hypothetical? not sure if it was written by chat-gpt?).

I mean, I'm sure many developers over the years have found their jobs disappear, and many contracting companies have gone out of business due to changed market. But at least through now, even with the layoffs, jobs developing websites are still plentiful. (Perhaps that won't be true in the future, sure).

I feel like OP is probably right that they are going to have a lot of trouble getting a job creating 3D art, that the job market has _drastically_ shrunken almost overnight, beyond the effect that wix/squarespace/etc had. (Although of course even in your example, it's a shrunken market)

But maybe I'm not correct?

[iamphilrae]

All I was really getting at was that it sapped the love (and money) out of the job, like the OP was suggesting for them and Midjourney. Once your art/talent has become something that either the common person or a machine can do, your only option as a career is to move on and diversify. It’s unfortunate, but has been happening for decades in all industries. Anyway, just sharing my experience of it happening to me.

[pdc56]

Curious - on a scale out of 10, how much of that was written by ChatGPT?

No offense intended - if the answer is zero, my apologies

[precompute]

I don't think it was written by a LLM, the words have a warmth that generated text lacks.

Plus you can tell it's written as if it's half-spoken.

[dmd]

> warmth

That shows the LLM is running on vacuum tubes.

[fxtentacle]

Perfect. My next business venture is selling ChatGPT text-warming equipment to audiophile readers.

[kergonath]

And gold-plated pure monocrystalline copper connectors.

[iLoveOncall]

> the words have a warmth that generated text lacks

Reminds me of my philosophy teacher in high-school that gave me the best grade of the year and praised how "personal" it felt, for an essay I had bought online for 3 euros.

The irony of it still makes me chuckle 15 years later.

[precompute]

Where's the irony?

[LeonB]

The lecturer perceived it to be “personal” implying authentic and genuine, but in truth the essay was the opposite of these things, that is ironic.

[precompute]

Sure, but it was written by a human and not a LLM.

[m348e912]

I think being able to identify LLM generated text would be a nice skill to have, but unfortunately I don't think it's as easy as you think it is.

[savef]

https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

Using this tool on the comment yields a 77.6% fake score. To give (pretty limited) contrast, a response from ChatGPT gives 99.9% fake, and another comment from this thread gives 0.1% fake.

I assume that means the comment text was GPT-assisted, with some moderate editing from a human.

[vbezhenar]

I checked this tool on some of my comments. Mostly it reported around "100% real". However https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259575 this comment was generated by ChatGPT and it was also reported as 97.6% real. And this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35286822 was reported as 88.79% fake but I wrote it myself. So I wouldn't trust this tool too much, even from my very limited testing it wasn't very reliable.

[hokkos]

I asked chatGTP to "write a hacker news like comment on the rise of website builders effect on web design and development industry and how to found joy in other roles and keeping programming in side hobby" and it gave me a 97% real comment by the score on this site, not convincing.

[mike_hearn]

Those tools are completely unreliable at the moment. Don't trust the results.

[savef]

Oh, I didn't know this. Thanks.

[Mistletoe]

This is fascinating. I can’t imagine why someone would go to the trouble to do all that for a comment.

[benja123]

I think it is likely the complete opposite of trouble. It helped them write their comment faster and in such a way that it was easy to understand. This is one of the best use cases for chatgpt. Rather than spend minutes trying to get the right wording, tell chatgpt what you want to say in a few short notes and get a well formed coherent text.

Now if this is a good thing, that’s up for debate - although overall I personally would say yes.

Written with zero chatgpt assistance

[michaelt]

> It helped them write their comment faster and in such a way that it was easy to understand.

Right, but why not save even more time by not commenting at all?

[nullandvoid]

I think the point here is that for a group of people (I would argue most) the primary goal of a comment is to broadcast your ideas, with the language being used to convey them of secondary concern, of which this part could be delegated to AI.

[MonkeyClub]

The irony of using a LLM to write a text that complains of the pervasiveness of automated tooling for web design is hard to miss.

But perhaps it’s just that the author has internalized copywriting formulas to a degree that their text appears machine generated?

[sokoloff]

The GPT-detector is fascinating (and seemed to work pretty well on some inputs I tested)

On the other hand, this next paragraph is scored as 84% fake and I'm quite sure Churchill didn't have Chat-GPT to help:

> We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

IMO, we must not be too quick to conclude that any given text was created/assisted by an LLM based on a scoring algorithm alone. (A low GPT likelihood is probably reliable [for now, until that starts being gamed].)

If you offered me even odds, I'd wager that the subject comment was 100% hand-written.

[Applejinx]

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar

[TeMPOraL]

Or Reddit. Let's not forget what LLMs are trained on. It's not just Wikipedia and some official text corpora, it's Reddit dumps and other regular Internet conversations. If you learned how to write English on-line, there's a chance you've internalized a style similar to how LLMs often respond.

(In fact, I often feel like I sound too much like ChatGPT myself.)

[sunny--tech]

I ran a 5000 character essay that was mainly generated by GPT4 and lightly edited by me through that and it reported 99.98% human lol

[fortyseven]

So this is the future we want, eh? Everybody paranoid, running everybody else's responses through an AI detector. One that isn't even trusting itself.

And the bitch of it is, people ARE going to be using AI generated responses in arguments.

The decade is turning out to be truly fucking terrible.

[iamphilrae]

100% truthfully, I wrote it all myself, but tweaked the opening paragraph with ChatGPT to improve my grammar slightly. It’s a great tool, and one that should not be dismissed, just like spell checkers and the grammar checkers of old in the likes on MS Word. Maybe it does come across a bit ChatGPT-like which is unfortunate I suppose.

As for the suggestions of me asking it to write the comment from prompts, then I’m afraid that’s 100% wrong.

[have_faith]

I’ve noticed a large amount of responses from chatgpt start the second/third paragraph with “however, “ or a similar adverb. It will always strive to provide a “balanced” view, even on heavily one sided subjects.

[figassis]

I use however a lot

[eega]

Same

[biztos]

However, it’s usually more covering its digital ass against the pitchfork-wielding critics than actually balancing the view.

[PartiallyTyped]

Imho 9:1 written entirely by human.

[lamontcg]

I wonder how much of the original reddit post was written by ChatGPT, it seems to tick a lot of boxes.

[lisp-pornstar]

30%, take your bets

[flerovium]

This feels different because we engineers are being eaten by our own young, but an artist never wanted or bargained for it.

Programming is fun, but humanity has always existed with art. We are slowly crushing something that is good and important.

[devoutsalsa]

Is it common to use website builders like SquareSpace with a backend API?