[ElProlactin]

I personally know several digital marketing people who were "tech savvy" but had no programming experience who have launched websites that would have cost them thousands of dollars to build.

So much of what you'd previously pay a "real" freelance developer or web "agency" to build is no less "garbage" than what engineers would call the average vibe-coded web app.

Claude in particular is today really surprisingly good at taking examples and a layperson's description of a website and building something that looks good and is functional.

For obvious reasons, I think many developers/engineers don't want to accept this. They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough. But the honest will acknowledge that spaghetti code and crap pre-dated AI.

[slyzmud]

> They'd prefer to believe that there's something special about their craft that means something produced by AI isn't good enough.

I know I can code and get better results than most people can with an LLM but I've came to realize that it doesn't matter and people just want to see results (even if they are kind of wrong).

In other words, with the website example, I've realized that even if the agency can do something 10x better, most people will choose to "buy" the AI website just because it's free or super cheap, and that makes me sad

[cryptonym]

Just like most industries, masses are looking for the cheapest solution with ok-ish perceived quality.

If you are looking for purpose, find a niche or do something else. If you want a job, embrace the slop.

[utopiah]

> digital marketing people who were "tech savvy" but had no programming experience who have launched websites that would have cost them thousands of dollars to build.

Static Websites have been commoditizatized for decades now. We had :

- one-click deploy Open-Source CMS

- single page places like Geocities providing own domain

- design templates where you just add your own logo, tagline, etc

This is just yet another way to do that but the ability to have that result was there for "digital marketing people" since the early 2000s, if not earlier. In fact since the Internet existed there have been tools and resources for non developer to make Websites.

PS: it's roughly the same for mobile Apps, namely having a basic App like a ToDo list had had scaffolding for years, including countless dedicated to non-developers.

[ElProlactin]

I'm not talking about static websites. I'm talking about tech-savvy non-engineers who have been able to build fully-functional dynamic websites (with user registration, dashboards, integrations with third-party services, etc.) using AI.

I think way too many engineers underestimate the ability of tech-savvy non-engineers to use AI to build quite sophisticated applications today.

Would these scale to millions of users? Are they totally secure? Surely no. But if we're being honest, most freelancers and agencies haven't been producing highly-scalable, highly-secure work product either.

[utopiah]

> dynamic websites (with user registration, dashboards, integrations with third-party services, etc.)

What do you think a CMS is?

[ElProlactin]

I'm not trying to get into a semantic argument. By one definition, almost any web application can be considered a CMS.

I'll reiterate my point: tech-savvy non-engineers are using AI to build the kind of dynamic web applications that many engineers don't want to believe can be built by non-engineers using AI.

One marketer I know built a sales-related application for a niche industry with Claude Code and and has been able to attract a handful of paying subscribers in just a few months.

I'm sure an experienced US or Europe-based freelance developer would have charged tens of thousands of dollars to build something similar, and an "agency/shop" double that. And I'm not sure anything they would have built would have been significantly "better".

[utopiah]

I'll reiterate my point too then: yes, and that's not new. There are always engineers selling to tech-savvy non-engineers tools transforming a service based on expertise to a product.

[ElProlactin]

If you think what AI is enabling, and how it's actually being used by tech-savvy non-engineers, is "not new", carry on.

The AI "hype" is the perfect example of how people see what they want to see, on both sides.

[LtWorf]

It's so funny to read these things. Thanks to AI people can do so many things.

I mean they could do them also in the 90s with microsoft access and a bit of clicking and copy pasting. But now it costs 10000x more so it's better.

[utopiah]

Right? It's like suddenly people discovered that tools can embody expertise. That's literally what we've been doing for ... our entire existence as a species.