POD 68 - Webflow moved on. Did we?

And I like that phrasing.

I have seen kind of similar things.

Even the clients that are not that tech savvy are kind of like wishing that whoever does their site, they do it with AI in mind so that it will be easy to edit with AI.

And maybe at some point they would be able to edit it too with AI.

And old Webflow or Webflow Classic, as we might end up calling that, might not be the best when it comes to editing sites with AI.

But this goes further than just Webflow.

In development in general, the question is that has development or has at least the front-end development been solved by AI? AI is obviously good at doing HTML, CSS, I guess JavaScript, because those are quite understandable languages.

There's clear feedback loop, like what works and what doesn't.

There are clear rules and so on.

And especially if you have some sort of migration or a comparison, a design or an old site, the AI can look at that and see if it has done the correct work.

And this is the whole conversation.

Webflow itself kind of said that the zero to one, the first build part of the process is kind of easy and everybody has seen all the amazing stuff and sites that AI can do.

But at the same time, everybody knows that there still needs to be some person like prompting the AI and fine tuning the details.

In his job announcement video, Timothy Ricks said the same thing, like AI is here to stay and AI development or AI enabled development is here to stay, but there still is a place for a technical person who makes sure that the actual site gets to a good enough level the details are there and the publishing and whatever comes after that goes smoothly he mentioned the good fast cheap toggle and in his opinion it is still the case that you can pick just two of those and I'm agreeing with Tim I'm agreeing with Ran.

And actually, I believe Kaparsa on Command plus AI show said something similar, or his opinion was more in lines that development is branching to design roles and to marketing roles.

It might not be shrinking, but it is kind of mixing with all those other roles.

And with my limited experience with AIs, and development.

I'm not disagreeing with any one of them.

I guess the whole conversation circles around the awesome stuff that we can do with AI and all the minor details it doesn't handle yet or we have to prompt one by one so that can be quite annoying and especially for someone who is coming from a platform like Webflow some edits are just so easy to make with a visual editor with a little slider or number value and many platforms are trying to build both of those things like good prompting and some sort of visual builder But people try to sell you an image where you can just one prompt a site.

And in theory, you can do that.

But if you're anything like me, there's probably some details that you need to take care either by prompting or with some sort of visual editor.

Depending on the platform, you might have that or not.

Okay, can you still be a Webflow-only developer? I would say that, in my opinion, with a little disclaimer that...

I'm not an authority on technical stuff or career advice, but in my opinion, that's a risky move.

If you like development, I believe there is still place for the technical person, just like Timothy said, but you might want to go deeper.