Table of Contents
TLDR – Is Web Development Dying?
Every few years someone declares web development is dead. First it was Dreamweaver, then WordPress, then no-code, Now it’s AI.
Each time, the tools got smarter and the people who knew what they were doing produced better products.
AI will kill off the copy-paste crowd, no doubt, but it won’t kill web development. It’ll force it to grow up agin.
The real challenge is in the thinking before the build, the strategy behind the UX and the data that drives outcomes.
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Introduction – The Rumour of Death
What feels like the end of a cycle is in reality a transition
“Why would we need developers? AI writes the all the code now.”
That was the question a CEO put to me last month.
Was he being pragmatic or was he showing off, he had seen the news stories, heard all the hype and seen a few demos.
“If an AI can knock out a working prototype from a text prompt, why hire a dev team?”
Was it a fair questions or was he very ill informed and naive, web development isn’t dying and what’s dying in the web development industry is the illusion that the value lies in typing code, it never was. It’s in the thinking before the build, it’s in designing great user experiences that solve business problems, it’s how to convert users and how to drive outcomes.
Every Few Years, We Hear the Same Thing
Not long after that we got to create websites with WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver or FrontPage and this is when I first heard the phrase “web development is dying” nearly three decades ago.
Later we had WordPress or Wix that promised to “democratise the web” and replace the need for bespoke development to build static websites.
Then came no-code platforms, with the same prophecy and now it’s AI.
The Real Value Was Never in the software development
Each wave claimed to replace us skilled developers and each one did exactly the same thing, the tools moved, perhaps raised the bar but human judgement because even more valuable.
Right now, AI is trying to rewrite the rulebook, but so far it’s not removing the need for web developers, in fact all its doing is exposing the ones who should never have been there in the first place.
So no, the industry isn’t dying and yes it’s chaining and quicker than ever before but the question leaders should be asking isn’t, “Do we still need web development?”
It’s
“What does great web development look like in an AI-first world?”
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Why This Myth Won’t Die
When Andrej Karpathy first created the phrase “vibe coding,” he wasn’t mucking about, all you have to do is describe what you want and watch the AI generate the code in front of your eyes.
When I first witnessed this, I was immediately a teenager again with the world at my feet excited by what could be achieved. But and there is a but, it’s great if you want to build something simple but as soon as you throw something at it that a mid or senior level developer would love to do it failed, and failed confidently in the way only AI knows how to.
AI is killing web development
But still the myth persists, that AI will be killing web development, your experienced developers, your product team and probably your head of UX too. Just have a look at YouTube, it has thousands of videos showing how cool AI is to code, they all claim that AI-generated code can now do what skilled web developers have spent years mastering and makes traditional web development obsolete. But sit back and really watch them again, look at what they are building, it’s all software nobody would use in the real business world.
Here’s what rarely gets mentioned:
- AI code is generated really quickly, but it’s so fragile, like a house of cards. It loses context quickly and often does not interpret instruction well (to be the last one is probably down to non developers trying to code).
- AI still needs a human in the loop, I have realised that to get the best out of any AI you need a subject matter expert driving it. especially on complex projects where business logic, data analytics, database and performance trade-offs are real-world use cases.
- If it’s too good to be true, it often is and “Quick wins” often easily backfire on you. I have seen companies trying to save a little money, do something quicker by swapping their full stack developers for AI agents and end up rehiring them very quickly when the software breaks.
- AI can support the build, its really good at the tasks us developers hate, we all hate writing unit test and test scripts, we love to spend our time solving puzzles not proving we have fixed it, It greats at peer reviews and spotting things a deadline may have made us miss. Just like AI is your companion, AI is my dev sidekick too.
What Web Development Still Really Means
So, yes, machine learning can help with the cadence of your web development project, yes it can help with better code, but what web development is about is a lot more than writing code and that’s what separates a coder from a digital strategist.
At Ronins, we see this every week, clients don’t come to us because they can’t find someone to write code. They come because they need something that increases their sales, gets more sign ups or leads and its impact lives beyond the IDE and into the boardroom.
So in my view web development isn’t dying its growing, demand will increase as more people get into the industry with vibe coding and realising they need help to make it secure and scale, but in this new world we will never get a better brief than a working POC.
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What’s the Future of Web Development?
When I started software development, it was on a ZX81, there was no internet to learn from, no crash logs, all we had was other peoples code that appeared in tech magazines that you had manually key in,
During my work life the term “web development” meant hand cranking HTML code, and as mobile phones were just phones the phrase responsive design was not invented.
I wish I had AI to learn from back then, its so easy to learn another language today and is so easy to say to say the AI I don’t see whats wrong here can you spot it and it comes back immediately with that comma is in the wrong place.
Having a development background has really helped my with vibe coding, I take all the things that I have learnt over the years, I create specifications, I create wireframes, I ask the AI to build the user interface first, the I try to wire up the logic and databases. I am sure the whole process gets stronger over time, but for now when you approach development with vibe coding with your developer hat on, you get better results.
When I rebuilt an app (without AI) for a leading fast food chain their brief was not about make the technology great it was to help them create a direct to consumer channel as Deliveroo was charging the 25% of each order and this was a cost saving exercise.
We had a similar challenge with a project with a connected thermometer we built for a global pharma brand. Their challenge was we don’t know who are are customer are ( as there is always a retailer in the middle ) and we are in a traditional business model ( retailers again ) please help.
Both of these projects, if they happened today, we could use AI to create interactive user prototypes earlier in the process, we could get POCs running sooner and AI could have taken a chunk of the load in testing the application across various different ai automation scenarios.
How Ronins Approaches AI-First Development
At Ronins, we no longer talk about “how many pages” or “what technical platforms do you want” first. We start with better more business questions like
- What behaviour are we trying to change?
- What are your ambitions ?
- Why should users care about your product / service?
- What motivates them to use yours ?
It’s only after we have been through a discovery phase and fully explored the UX do we start the build process. Yes we Ai to perform competitor research, business model analysis, data analysis across your current analytics tool set, but we only use AI to help write code when the digital strategy is correct.
The future of web development isn’t how quickly you can write code, it’s how thoroughly you can define your digital strategy with AI, refine the UX and roll out the code.
I can see a future where clients will come to us with rapid POCs they have created themselves and want to scale it out to something secure and scalable. These are the briefs I am longing for, the ones where someone had experimented and come up with something truly disruptive.
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What can web designers deliver to clients now
AI doesn’t create the brief, it sharpens it.
This is the pattern of what we are seeing clients looking for right now. The majority of clients already have the technology, it’s not their first website or app but something is not working for their business and don’t know how to fix it or understand what the issue is. Have their search engine rankings declined as nobody is monitoring their SEO and their traffic numbers are dropping, is their user experience now considered legacy as others have tried to disrupt them or do users simply never come back as they don’t see the value exchange.
In all of these instances AI tools can play a significant role in helping define web development and where the issue lies.
- we can export your search console data alongside other tools like href and use AI ad your data scientist, it will spot trends, track average positions and movement in click through rates, quicker and with more accuracy than any human could.
- We can feed is user journey videos from Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity to spot where users go and where they get frustrated quicker than ever before,
- We can analyse the competition in greater numbers than ever before like how many subscribers do they have, what are their business models, what investments have they raised and to who all from publicly available data that AI is so good at findings
- We can create personas and map your audience insights from their social posts, reviews or email comms
- We can plan your website architecture with the help of entity mapping and content clustering.
- We can use AI to help with creating AB testing of landing pages and suggesting variants with reasons why to try
- AI can help code and produce POCs before you invest heavily in building the technology to prove your innovative UX works
- We case Use AI help with quality assurance by developing unit tests and test scripts, we can even use computer use to simulate real world testers by setting the AI task to achieve.
There a so many applications where AI can help in web development and they are not all about coding.
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Invitation to Founders, CMOs, Product Leads, and Web Developers
Invitation to Founders, CMOs, Product Leads and Web Developers
Strategy matters more than ever. Let’s build like it.
If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re not here for another AI demo or dev-for-hire.
You’re asking deeper questions:
- How do I get more intelligence to create a better product?
- What can we automate, without losing quality?
- How do we make more sales out of our digital marketing?
Whether you’re leading a scale-up or launching a new venture, or simply trying to squeeze more ROI from your current spend our are not looking for code, you are looking for more data to make better decisions which gives you more confidence going forward.
That’s where we come in.
At Ronins, we don’t just “do websites or apps.” We build products built around your business ambitions and only measure success against the technology reaching your goals.
So whether its a new website designed to attract more users in Google or the AI engines, or a SaaS product that needs more subscribers and a higher client retention rate or even a process that everyone hates and we can use some AI automation to free up your team to work on more meaning full tasks we have expertise to help.
If you’re questioning what to prioritise next, or whether your digital estate is still fit for purpose across today’s mobile devices, we should talk.
And if you’re someone looking to learn web development in a way that aligns with real-world business outcomes I’m always open to mentoring sharp minds.
Let’s talk when you’re ready
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