I have to say, the other day I tested out ChatGPT sites. Around a year ago I built a website for a rehearsal space - a booking system app - and spent a whole day with ChatGPT building it. It was janky, ugly, and getting there was a process. FWIW, traditional systems dev is what I learned, but I know fuck all about front-end, and I'm not too well versed on web dev in general. I did have to get under the hood and do some coding after I ran out of usage with ChatGPT back then.
But with sites? I made a big picture spec sheet, and asked ChatGPT to expand on that. Then I fed that spec sheet into sites. 30 minutes later it spit out a perfectly working site of what I had tried to make a year ago. Not only that, it was much richer, and had more features. I asked for around 10 changes and new features, and all but one worked flawlessly. One time it managed to break functionality, but it was swiftly fixed. I didn't write or edit a single line of code. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
I've previously been on the buying side, and this was a website which could have easily ended up costing $10k-$15k with all the functionality. If not more. And I ended up getting that with my measly $20 subscription.
Web dev as a career is not dead, or dying, but I predict that A LOT of the people that would make those $0 - $10k sites are going to have a tough time ahead.
EDIT: This was also on par with my general experience with AI. For the longest time you can use frontier models, be unhappy with the results and tell yourself this sucks - and then out of nowhere some updates comes along, and suddenly everything just works perfectly well.
But with sites? I made a big picture spec sheet, and asked ChatGPT to expand on that. Then I fed that spec sheet into sites. 30 minutes later it spit out a perfectly working site of what I had tried to make a year ago. Not only that, it was much richer, and had more features. I asked for around 10 changes and new features, and all but one worked flawlessly. One time it managed to break functionality, but it was swiftly fixed. I didn't write or edit a single line of code. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
I've previously been on the buying side, and this was a website which could have easily ended up costing $10k-$15k with all the functionality. If not more. And I ended up getting that with my measly $20 subscription.
Web dev as a career is not dead, or dying, but I predict that A LOT of the people that would make those $0 - $10k sites are going to have a tough time ahead.
EDIT: This was also on par with my general experience with AI. For the longest time you can use frontier models, be unhappy with the results and tell yourself this sucks - and then out of nowhere some updates comes along, and suddenly everything just works perfectly well.