So, I was a late adopter when it comes to an AI-assisted web development workflow, not just for web development, but for everything, because of my old-school mindset. In the early to mid-2000s, I operated an IRC server, which used IRC bots, and I had an idea of how those bots think, for lack of a better terminology, because I could program them to look like they’re smart, but they really weren’t. They could be queued, and they could be triggered based on things that happened in their environment, which made it look like they had intelligence. So, that is kind of how I thought about AI, and to a degree, that’s true, because AI literally predicts the next word in a sequence.
That being said, I didn’t have much use for it for a long time, and I didn’t even try it, and I can’t remember why I decided to give it a shot. When I did finally give it a shot, I realized AI could do all of the things as far as coding, building a website, that it took me sometimes weeks to do, because I couldn’t just remember everything. If I had to write a PHP script, at some point, I would have to research what I’m doing, but AI already knows how to do it, knows the code, and saves a lot of time. That made me think that there’s not even any point in building websites anymore, because regular people can use an AI to spit out a website in under 5 minutes, content included.
So, my web development career is over, right? It took me a while to realize for some people AI is a cheat. And those are the people that don’t know what they’re doing. For people who have an idea on what they’re doing, AI is not a cheat. It is a tool. It is a time saver. And even the AI for weeks tried to explain to me that I’m not just a developer anymore. I am the architect. And that’s bot speak, but it took a while for that to set in.
“For people who have an idea on what they’re doing, AI is not a cheat. It is a tool. It is a time saver.”
So, if every spammer out there is building websites in 5 minutes, and maybe even building 4 or 5 websites a day, I have no idea what they’re doing, but they’ve made a mess of the internet, I know that. But back to my point, if they’re doing that, then what point is there in me building a quality website of my own? Because it’s just going to get drowned out by the tsunami of garbage websites out there. So, I started looking at how I can use AI to strengthen my systems.
Strengthening Processes and Tightening Systems
When I started looking at AI as a tool to strengthen my processes and systems, that’s when things really started to click. Because when I started this process, I was still building websites like I did 20 years ago, because that’s what I knew and that’s how I did it. Honestly, I had no idea how much things had changed. So I went to AI for the answers. What are developers using now? How are developers going about this now? The processes are for the most part the same as they have always been, but the tools have evolved.
So after a lot of research and hit and miss, I figured out what the local staging environments look like these days, and what staging on the web looks like these days, and what versioning looks like these days. I learned all of that by using AI. So now that I have my environment set up, I can use AI to streamline and tighten my processes. It’s like having a little buddy in my sidebar. When something goes wrong, I don’t have to hunt for a missing quotation mark for 20 minutes. I can just ask the AI, “Hey, what’s going on here?” and it finds the bug for me.
If there’s a concept I don’t necessarily understand or a new tool I’m trying to set up for the first time, AI is like asking the internet because it literally has all of the internet and the best answers right there and readily available. In fact, I’m using AI to write this article right now. No, I didn’t ask it to just create an article for me, and I am using my exact own words. And I am not going to go through the process because a guy has to have his secrets, but it’s a good process that wasn’t available before AI.
Now, some people, the spammers, would just tell the AI to create an article. And I’ve done that. But what I’ve learned is AI is not good at that. They use a lot of what I call bot speak. So that led me down the path of how to write articles with the help of AI with my own words, not my style or mimicking how I write, I know people do that too, but using my exact words.
The Shift From Developer to Architect
So, after adopting the philosophy of being the architect, I realized that whatever ideas I come up with, they don’t necessarily have to take a long time to put into production. So with AI, I can say, “This is how I want to build this. This is how I want it to work.” And I can use AI to help me achieve that goal in a lot less time than I ever could before. I don’t mean just let AI spin it up, whatever that is, but I can use AI to be my assistant in bringing that idea to reality.
So for example, I want a plugin for a WordPress website, but I don’t want to use a third party. I just want something that’s lightweight and gets the job done. Instead of writing the code, all I have to do is have AI write the code. I oversee it. I test it. And when I’m done, I can even have AI test it even further for things like security vulnerabilities or performance issues. Again, that’s something that may have taken days or even weeks before.
“Instead of writing the code, all I have to do is have AI write the code. I oversee it. I test it.”
I suppose anyone can do this. And I think the difference lies in the fact that I used to build websites by hand. By hand, I mean a text editor, an FTP program, and my keyboard. When the AI has created something for me, I know what I’m looking at. I know what to look for. I know what to ask it to test for. I know what to test for. So in that case, AI didn’t just help me to create something, it helped me to create something better.
