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Comment by notjustanymike | Hacker News Reader

Auto-generated content has a tendency to raise only the baseline in industries. For web development first it was Dreamweaver, then WordPress templates, then SquareSpace and Wix. Bootstrap came along, then Material and a thousand other prepackaged design languages. While these advancements reduced the income from building mom & pop restaurant websites, the demand for high-end curated sites never really changed.

Just focus your efforts on continuing to produce quality work, those clients never dry up.

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> those clients never dry up

As someone who used to work in web dev, they most certainly do and did.

And you have an ever growing pool (worldwide) of workers who are jostling over that dwindling supply of gigs.

Yup, I second that.

Many places that I've worked with are now considering using a zero code website creator instead of actually coding, and for many scenarios it just works perfectly, cheap, and flawlessly. Of course it's not for everything especially if there's customization and server technologies involved, but it's very big to create disruption.

I would be surprised to learn that the absolute number of web devs today has gone down since SquareSpace came out. Yes, the $500 website is dead, but there’s still tons of work for tons of people.

Meh. There’s plenty of work to go around. At the low end, companies are rebuilding their websites all the time, whether it’s on Webflow or whatever. At the higher end, there is plenty of integration work, enterprise apps, etc to be built. Competition is fierce but there is opportunity if you specialize properly and build the right relationships.

Web dev as in building websites has been dead for a quite a while. Web dev as in building web systems is alive and kicking. I fail to see how a complex webapp can be written in no code. A wordpress kind of app, sure. A complex web ui for a complex backend nah.

You missed my point and are stating the obvious. The problem is that that is a just a tiny tiny tiny fraction of all websites. The vast majority of websites are websites. Which leaves all web devs fighting over the few web app gigs.

I've been the hiring manager for web app gigs for 10 years, and not once have I had a surplus of qualified candidates.

Could this be because your pipeline for app gigs is drawing from the candidate pool of `all web devs` who were qualified for web dev but aren't yet for web app dev?

Sounds rhetorical, but I ask sincerely.

AI hasn't really come for programming yet. Copilot, imperfect as it is, is proof that the problem can be approached.

I think junior software engineers could realistically be obsolete in 5 years. Imagine a software architect being able to prompt: "write a rest API that exposes user data from system A to internal system B", and have a complete API dumped out, with tests, ready to be deployed.

Sounds a bit like Zapier. Love that tool.

Maintaing code written by such AI must be truly nightmarish...

Imagine that it only had black box testing - you can verify the ins and outs, and don't care about the middle. The AI's responsible for the entire codebase for that particular API.

I don't believe this will scale to all software anytime soon, but the type of thing that junior engineers work on is vulnerable.

If junior software engineers are obsolete in five years, where would we get senior software engineers from in fifteen years?

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