A response to Time to FIRE Your Web Developers! (October 2024)
In October 2024 I posted a video with a deliberately provocative title: Time to FIRE Your Web Developers! I opened with a story from my days at Rhode Island School of Design, where I learned letterpress printing and wood engraving, and I walked through how each new typesetting technology made the last one obsolete. Hand-set type gave way to the linotype. The linotype gave way to photographic typesetting. Photo type gave way to the desktop.
My point was that the Low-Code/No-Code revolution was doing the same thing to web developers. If you wanted a truly custom website, I said,
“you needed web developers with skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and at least one programming language like PHP. But not anymore.”
That was true at the time. Page builders like Elementor let us produce fully custom designs without writing the code by hand, and that saved our clients a great deal of money. I still stand behind that recommendation for the world as it was in 2024.
But I left out one thing about my own story. Every one of those typesetting technologies thought it was the last one.
The trade offs I asked you to accept
The most important part of that video wasn’t the history lesson. It was the economic principle I set up for the rest of the series, the difference between trade offs and solutions. Web developers were raising objections to low code: that it couldn’t be fully customized, that the interfaces were too complicated, that it didn’t produce clean code, and that it was slower and bogged down with plugins. And I admitted something:
“Because there is a degree of truth in each of those critiques.”
My answer was that you should accept those weaknesses, because the alternative cost too much. I asked the question this way:
“The old hand-coded approach is not without some benefits, but compared to what alternatives, and at what cost?”
That was the right question, and in 2024 the answer was clear. Hand coding was slow and expensive, so we took the extra weight of a page builder in exchange for a lower budget and more flexibility. It was a good trade.
Here is what has changed. AI agents now write and revise custom code, quickly, under experienced direction. The cost that made hand coding a bad deal has collapsed. So when I ask the same question today, “compared to what alternatives, and at what cost?”, I get a different answer. Clean code, lean pages, and fully custom design are no longer luxuries you pay a premium for. They come with the way we build now.
We no longer have to choose. We can have the custom design, the clean code, the fast pages, and the lower budget.
The revolution came for us too
In that video I said the developers who were being displaced would fight back by disparaging the new technology:
“They will search for any and every reason why the new technology is flawed, or isn’t quality.”
I have to be honest with myself here. This time the disruption came for the approach I had been championing. I could have spent the last year looking for every reason why AI-built websites aren’t quality, just like the type house reps I used to argue with. Instead I did what I asked those art directors to do in the early nineties. I sat down, tried it, and watched what it could do.
What it could do was remove the very compromises I had asked my clients to live with.
Where the work went
I also predicted where web development jobs would go:
“those jobs are shifting away from building websites directly, to jobs building the tools used in Low-Code/No-Code development.”
That shift turned out to be shorter-lived than I expected. The code is back. It is just that agents are writing most of it. What they need is someone who knows what ought to be built, can direct the work, and can tell whether the result is right. That is the part of web development I have been doing since 1995, and it turns out to be the part that matters most now.
So no, I am not telling you to rehire a room full of developers. I am telling you that you no longer need a heavy page builder standing in for them. Fire the bloat. Keep the judgment.
What stays the same
The purpose behind that 2024 video hasn’t changed. When technology makes an expensive step in the process less necessary, clients should get the benefit. Low code did that for a while. Agentic development does it better, without asking you to give anything up in return.
If your site is built on a page builder today, we can rebuild it on our AI-native theme, keep your content and design, and leave the extra weight behind.
¡Viva la Revolución!