“AI, make the website good”

Millions of Large-Language-Model-generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development. We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves).

I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize self-congratulatory tooling improvements for what they are: automated simplicity (aka can-kicking complexity) from software companies claiming to be at the bleeding edge of technique and application.

I’m always left wondering (suspecting the answer with hopeful optimism that my hunch is wrong this time): do these workflow improvements actually improve how people (technical or otherwise) experience software? Certainly we have more software. But is it better?

Front-end web developers have lived through about fifteen years of the single-page-application-era smokescreen, sold as though improvements to developer experience would cause the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan himself to ask you for commit access to ship trickle-down improvements to user experience.

Are we repeating the same playbook (on a more accelerated pace)? Certainly we’ve seen numerous recent anecdotal examples of software becoming less reliable over time (GitHub is the most recent scapegoat I’ve seen, but on my read they seem to be a second-order victim more than anything) (seems like a great time to be in the Monitoring/Status Page business).

With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as caring about the quality of output (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is more important than ever. Caring about what you ship will always have real-world value to visitors/consumers/users real people.

Prefers-reduced-motion respecting web performance filmstrips from the AI category on Speedlify, a category boasting a failing median Core Web Vitals score with 12 out of 13 sites failing Lighthouse performance and Axe accessibility checks.