Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is revolutionizing the web development industry, but is it a threat to web developers? There’s been lots of talk online about A.I. taking peoples jobs. I recently watched this great video from Justin Jackson on why he thinks AI won’t replace web developers:
In short – I agree. A.I. isn’t going to take jobs. Much like No Code or Open Source didn’t.
For sure, there will be a certain level of developer that A.I. will take work from, much like the SquareSpaces and Wix of this world took a chunk out of the template based web design market, but SaaS apps? they are more complex in my mind.
I used to be a web developer, and transitioned careers into product design, so know enough about the space to have gone and tried most of the current tools out, and have found them amazing at certain things, but equally average at others (which is no surprise, given they are guessing based on a vast pool of training data, not all of it good).
What does a good product need that A.I. struggles with?
Human intuition in deciding what makes software good
Building a good product requires thoughtfulness, and decision making, and human intuition, something that Artificial Intelligence just doesn’t have.
For example, yes, you can ask an A.I. to make a pricing grid for your website. Will it look good? quite possibly. Will it effectively sell your product? That’s another question completely, that needs knowledge of your product, your market, and your customers current needs and wants, and not something an A.I. can give. It guesses, and lacks nuance.
Human intuition translates into designing a good product based on learned experience, and intelligence.
Consistency
A good well-designed product has rules, a design system, and ways of doing things, that A.I. can’t quite (yet) do well. If every time you ask it to do something it’s slightly different, that won’t work in a good product.
System level thinking/deep product understanding
Sure you can get from zero to one with A.I. But can you go from one to three? Can you reliably build a consistent product across a large surface?
