My distance from web development prepared me for the age of AI agents

*Extract*

I’ve replaced outsourced web developers with AI agents. — and I haven't looked back. Not because the work became trivial, but because the ratio between time spent and value delivered shifted so dramatically that the old model stopped making sense.

The core insight: for showcase websites, HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript are not just sufficient — they're superior. No frameworks, no dependency chains, no toolchain to configure. The agent handles execution; I handle judgment, taste, and the client relationship that actually determines whether the result is good.

A certain kind of monopoly is over. Those who built careers on knowing the right frameworks have lost what, for many types of projects, was their main differentiator. What replaced it isn't just automation — it's a different philosophy about where value actually lives in the process.

Agree with this. I have managed teams of front-end developers in the past. If I had a team today of, say, five front-end developers, three of them would be laid off, minimum, as we adopt AI. I've used Claude code to build frontends recently and it can do the work of several front end developers, amd do it very well. One or two frontend developers would be kept to manage the AI and work with it. In that case, they cease to be front-end developers and become AI builders.