She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website.
I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's still experimental). She just provides the current website, tells how she wants it to look and it works great. I mean it's obviously ai generated but she gets quick results and is able to tweek things to look better by just telling deepseek what to do. She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer.
This is a simple example. Basically it's one of those earlier jobs that you could get someone to bid on for $x but now you can do yourself for $20.
I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded.
Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times.
But overall it was super empowering for her.
like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough.
the fact that your wife can be productive at lower cost means that more products will be built and more opportunities will be made. instead of spending money on website design, her business can spend money developing biotech.
i welcome that, even if it means that things will change from the past and those that have made a career out of charging thousands will get replaced by a $20/month subscription.
Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result.
But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots of unreliable and unoptimized code that will go live if you don't know what they're doing under the hood and can potentially cause issues in the future. Remember that all this tools do are sorts of interpolation. I've seen lately lots of "modern" websites with tons layers of !important in their CSS and who knows the monstrosities that they have with their JS.
Meanwhile I and all people like me still don't have a job because all of this and the alleged "thousands" I was getting for doing this things.
the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic job at that. that is what the OP was talking about in his article.
you don't have a job because you're not adapting to this new world order quickly enough. i predict that there will be insane demand for porting existing applications off these over priced SASS contracts and building tailored products for businesses. as much as they are trying to convince people, you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model and can envision a better solution to the actual problem out of thin air.
i'm burning 500m+ tokens a day on a $200/mo subscription. it is creating 10000x more value for me. it is no longer how much you know HTML/CSS, it is how well you know how to get AI to do what you want it to do and the only way to develop that skill, is to do it.
i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written.
from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid of quickbooks because yesterday it was down and i couldn't log into it. figure out what i'm using there and present me an interface that allows me to do whatever i'm doing in quickbooks, but with my existing data from stripe, deel and mercury."
it then dutifully went off and built me that app and now i'm running it in parallel and synchronized with quickbooks, until i feel that i can just turn that off. it is customized exactly to my business workflow and easily maintained with full unit tests. it costs me nothing but a $200/mo codex subscription and a few hours of work.
A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. While I'm quite good at highlighting the most important insights and non-obvious traits of a system, I'd still be guessing what the reader needs from my doc at the end of the day. Claude can answer questions based on what the reader is curious about and wants to learn.
Some types of document are still useful, namely higher-level directional or philosophical topics about the intention of a codebase. e.g. "we would like to eventually move X system to Rust for Y reason", "we chose mutable data structures over immutable in this part of the system because Z". But fewer than before.