The Question I Keep Getting Asked
Over the last year, one question has come up in almost every conversation I have with founders, friends, and even other people in the industry. If AI can build a website now, do businesses still need developers? And by extension, do they still need studios like ours?
I understand why people ask. You can type a few lines into a tool and get a working page back in under a minute. It has a hero section, some cards, a button, maybe even a contact form. From the outside, it genuinely looks like the job is done.
But I think the important distinction is between being able to generate a website and being able to actually build and ship a good one. Those two things sound similar. In practice, they're very different jobs.
What AI Actually Gives You
If you're someone who hasn't coded before, or doesn't have a strong understanding of design, what an AI tool gives you on the first try is usually going to be fairly generic. It will look clean enough. It will follow familiar patterns. But it won't really be yours, and it won't have been built around your business, your customers, or what you need the site to actually do.
And once you start looking closely, there are usually quite a few flaws. Spacing that breaks on certain screen sizes. Forms that look fine but don't actually go anywhere. Pages that load slowly because nobody thought about images or scripts. Copy that sounds polished but says nothing specific. Accessibility that was never considered at all.
None of this is obvious in the first five minutes, which is exactly why it's easy to believe the job is finished. The problems tend to show up later, when real users, real traffic, and real business requirements arrive.
Where Real Websites Get Hard
A website that actually works for a business is rarely just a few pages of nicely arranged content. The moment you need a proper backend, integrations with your CRM or payment provider, content your team can update without breaking things, good performance, responsiveness across every device, and handling for all the edge cases, you're in different territory.
These are the parts that decide whether a site is professional and reliable, or just looks like it is. What happens when a form submission fails? What happens when someone uploads a file that's too large? What happens when traffic spikes after a campaign goes live? What happens six months later when you need to add a new section and the code was never structured to allow it?
Answering those questions well needs someone who understands how the whole system fits together. That's still developer work. AI can help with pieces of it, but it doesn't own the outcome, and it won't be the one who gets the call when something breaks after launch.
You Can Usually Tell
Honestly, I think it's becoming increasingly easy to tell which websites are AI-generated and which ones have had real human input. They start to share a certain look. The same layouts, the same gradients, the same safe phrasing, the same sections in the same order. Individually, none of it is bad. Together, it feels like a template that nobody really thought about.
It's the same as content. You can usually tell when something has been mass-generated versus when someone has actually sat with the writing and thought it through. Same with graphics. AI-generated visuals and work created by a designer with an actual point of view feel very different, even if you can't always explain why.
For a business, that difference matters more than people expect. Your website is often the first impression someone has of you. If it looks like a hundred other sites, it quietly tells visitors you're interchangeable too. Generic doesn't just look bland. It actively costs you trust.
How We Actually Use AI
I want to be clear that I'm not anti-AI at all. We use it ourselves, of course. It would be strange not to. But for us, it's a tool that helps us work faster rather than something that does the entire job.
It's genuinely useful for speeding up repetitive tasks, exploring options quickly, getting a first draft of something to react to, and catching things we might otherwise spend longer on. That's real value, and it lets us spend more of our time on the parts of the work that actually need judgment.
But most of the design, the decisions, the refinement, and the implementation are still done and reviewed by us. Every choice that affects how the site looks, how it behaves, and how it serves the business goes through people who understand why it's being made. That's a big part of why we're senior-only. AI makes experienced people faster. It doesn't replace the experience.
Is the Need for Developers Going Down?
I don't think it is. If anything, I think AI is going to make good developers significantly faster, and that makes good developers more valuable, not less. Someone who already understands architecture, design, and business context can now move through the routine parts of a project much more quickly and spend that saved time on quality.
What I think is changing is the floor. It's become much easier for someone with no technical background to get something that looks like a website. That's genuinely useful for a lot of people, like a quick personal page, a simple event site, or testing an idea over a weekend.
But if you want your website to actually be good, functional, scalable, polished, and not feel like a generic AI-generated site, you still need to know what you're doing. The gap between "it exists" and "it works well for the business" hasn't disappeared. It's just become harder to see at first glance.
What We've Seen From Our Side
From our own experience, neither our sales nor the demand from our target audience has gone down because of AI. We're still working with the same kind of clients, and they continue to value the quality and level of work we provide.
I think part of that is because the businesses we work with already understand what's at stake. For an established company, the website isn't a side project. It's tied to conversions, credibility, sales conversations, and operations. A site that looks fine but quietly underperforms costs them far more than doing it properly in the first place.
We've also deliberately chosen not to mass-produce websites or compete purely on volume. That was a conscious decision long before AI tools became this good, and if anything, it's made more sense since. When anyone can generate something average in a minute, average stops being worth paying for. Thoughtful work becomes the thing people actually come looking for.
Just My Take
This is my personal view, based on how we've approached the market and what we've seen with our own clients. I'm not sure it's necessarily true for every developer or every agency, and I definitely don't think everyone would agree with me on this. Studios built around speed and volume might be feeling this shift very differently.
But from where we sit, AI hasn't removed the need for people who know how to build things well. It has made the difference between generated and genuinely built easier to feel, and our clients seem to value being on the right side of that line. That's been true for us so far, and I expect it to stay that way.
