Web Development & Design is a very versatile shop, as it offers many careers for all different types of people – developers, designers, and more. However, an emerging issue has come up in recent years for this field: Artificial Intelligence. If you’re unaware, Artificial Intelligence (AI for short) is a technology enabling computers to perform tasks requiring human intelligence, like learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and perception, by analyzing data, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. Things like ChatGPT are like this and were one of the first. Now, this might not seem like a big deal at first, but AI allows unexperienced developers & designers to suddenly create artificially generated content with no skill outside of typing in a prompt to the Large Language Model (LLM for short). Back in the day, you’d have to hire a web designer or developer to get yourself a website within a day or so for a certain amount of money. Now? Free, forever. Open up ChatGPT (or whatever AI that you use), ask it to make you a website and a few graphics: done. That might sound easier… for the end user. For the actual developers who spend their time learning the ways of web development? Horrible. Absolutely dreadful. Nobody wants to hire a professional web developer or designer anymore, since AI can just “do it for you.” Not only does this remove a major option for early or young web developers & designers to make money, but it also forces them into a choice. Use artificial intelligence to enhance your work, or choose a different path? This is what this blog is for – to convince the shop of Web Development & Design to change for the better. I will go into detail on how & why we as students should be taught at a more extensive level, learning more coding languages, the basics of cybersecurity, hardware, and more low-level applications of development.
Now to start off, we need to understand that AI isn’t going anywhere. It’s not some trend that fades out (like fidget spinners did). AI is here to stay, and if we ignore it completely, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. Instead of letting it replace us, we need to learn how to work with it. Think like this: if we learn the fundamentals of how AI works — how to implement APIs, train models, or even integrate AI tools into our work (without letting it overtake our creativity) — we can stay in control of the outcome instead of being replaced by it. That’s why this shop should push us further than just building websites from templates or dragging and dropping elements on a screen. We should be digging into more advanced topics like full stack development, database management, or even the basics of ethical hacking. If we understand how things really work under the hood (of AI), we’ll be more than “just developers” or “just designers.” We’ll become the creators, the problem solvers, and the innovators who can adapt to whatever new technology comes in our path. Learning multiple coding languages is also a huge part of that. HTML, CSS, and Javascript are great. But, what about Python, or even C++? Each language gives you a different way to manipulate computers, some more or less. The more one knows, the more flexible one becomes — and that’s what this field really needs right now: people who can evolve. So yes, AI might have overtaken the already primitive web development industry, but it didn’t end it. The Web Development & Design shop has the potential to teach us how to be better. We just need to stop fearing the future and start preparing for it.