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.
> 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.
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.
> 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