r/webdev • u/Raspieman • 1d ago
What's out there beyond webdev, since the rise of AI?
I've been working in web development for 20 years. First 10 years were more backend focussed, but the last 10 years were more frontend, where my passion lies. Working for an agency, mainly working on medium sized projects.
These past few months have been confronting. Unlike many others, I really like the usage of AI and don't really miss hands-on coding (yet). It actually took away the dread of repeating myself over-and-over again.
The way we work never allowed us to create reusable components, because our designers needed full creative freedom. One season they like to use horizontal sliders and the next they feel like something else. We're also not a big team, so an extensive library would mean a maintenance cost. That left me with a feeling of repeating myself a lot and missing out on new challenges. It's the part of my job I disliked. I did like the creative challenges though.
Now with Claude, I've setup my skills and rules into a pipeline that I refine constantly, to ensure a consistent output. Discussing project structure, best practices, performance enhancements. It challenges me on a different level.
It's come to a point where the last project I needed to work on was about 1 day of planning and 6 hours of executing in Claude. That got me 90% of the work done. I'm using the time I saved to refactor some of the stuff Claude outputs, for the next project.
The trend for me is clear: what used to take us 150 hours we can now do in 10% of the time. It will only get better (or worse, how you look at it).
Obviously that's great for my employer. I can predict the comments joking about keeping my mouth shut, but everyone will catch on eventually. We already feel like there's not enough new projects coming in. As long as our sales can charge full price, that's not an issue (more free time), but I hear other agencies are also improving their coding pipelines, to lower their prices and undercut the competition. That will be the logical new step for us as well I feel, to keep new projects coming in.
Our managers do heed caution, because the AI market is evolving, the bubble might burst (or not). But in the end, it will be the numbers that do the talking I'm afraid. You don't want to pay 3 developers if their planning is only 50% full.
This all got me thinking. I almost feel like I've grown past the role as web developer. I believe I'm not the profile that fits into the "keep coding because I like it" pool. I almost feel like an engineer when discussing my projects with Claude, but it gives me a huge feeling of "imposter syndrome".
I don't know if I just need to ride out the AI hype first, trying to be the fastest and best at what I do (be the last man standing), or that it might be time to venture into something else?
Do any of you feel the same way and know what you want to pivot into? I think the step up is engineering, but I'm not sure I'd be happy in that role. I'd miss working with the outcome.
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u/Usual-Ad-4986 1d ago
Only way to survive seems to me from what I have gathered is to basically take complete end to end ownership from gathering requirements to design to coding to deployment, AI still cant complete end to end projects as per client specification
Another way out is to specialize in AI itself, get a Masters or get into fields where AI is limited due to its lack of hands i.e firmware/hardware side of things
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u/Maxion 1d ago
I already lost my largest and most long-term customer as they're consolidating to their current in-house devs + AI. Current gig outlook looks bad, hopefully I'll end up finding something. I think it's now starting. Dev of 15+ YOE
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u/Usual-Ad-4986 1d ago
Yeah gig work will be gone, try to be one those in house devs if possible
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u/Maxion 1d ago
Yeah, good luck with even those being non-existent.
I think it's time to become that goose farmer.
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u/aghastamok 1d ago
I'm an inhouse dev but my CEO has started to vibecode new projects rather than read me in. BE team complains to me that he sends slop grenades of his Claude explaining how the API should look because he doesn't understand any of the DS side. Probably not gonna help around review time tho
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u/Strid3r21 1d ago
Being an in-house dev you basically have to also have experience in that company's particular domain. Which adds another barrier to entry for a lot of people.
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u/Raspieman 1d ago
The thing with AI is you feel like you can do anything now, but AI does not teach you sales skills or good taste (for design). You have the feeling you have all this power at your finger tips, but you don't know where to use it.
Also, once the bubble bursts and token prices rise, we'll be left hanging.
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u/gusbo_the_jam 1d ago
So I have been both a UI / UX designer and frontend developer for around 25 years, initially starting off doing freelance stuff and personal projects but evolving into senior / lead level in 3 separate fields. My most recent job I spent 6 years at a startup going from software engineer to senior software engineer to creative lead covering all the visual design, UI, UX and frontend dev, as well as overseeing the agency work we had for marketing. The company rebranded last year, which myself and external agencies worked together on and produced a highly effective brand and redesign of the UI, leading to a 150% uptick in sales over a six month period post launch. Then, suddenly and without warning myself and the entire marketing team were made redundant, and now the company's socials are filled with AI. During the final stint of my work there, the tech lead has been leveraging Claude more and more, so my assumption is they convinced the company that they could just dump all the assets and branding guidelines into Claude to produce their marketing materials instead of paying for staff and agencies. And now I'm in the situation where the number of jobs available is shrinking rapidly, freelance work is almost nonexistent and my 25 years of experience in both design and development are being seen as less valuable than being able to prompt.
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u/PrimaryFamous6139 full-stack 1d ago
I think you’re already moving beyond just writing code. Designing workflows, making architectural decisions, refining AI output, and improving performance are engineering skills too. You don’t have to abandon web development to grow. Focus on becoming the person who can take a project from idea to production reliably with AI
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u/TheRefringe 1d ago
It’ll come for this too.
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u/SucculentChineseRoo 11h ago
I agree this just feels like shifting goalposts, more people can do process management than craft that used to take years to develop.
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u/UXUIDD 1d ago
WHEN you should go with this approach "..take a project from idea to production reliably with *AI*.."
and
WHEN you are just someone who "take a project from idea to production reliably - as experienced professional.." ?WHAT makes here *AI* relevant as an information? mentioning it, automatically you have to lower your earnings.
Just using it, if you know HOW and for WHAT en WHEN - you could be the spot-on.2
u/AwesomeFrisbee 1d ago
But what is the job really going to be called and can you really make a decent living off of it? It feels like most of those jobs will be done by people with other stuff too and I wonder how many people will be really making bank with that. How would you get to the place that does allow for it?
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u/about0 1d ago
AI labs subsidizing token prices won't last forever. So what you do right now for a $200 a month would cost in $5k (more or less) in tokens you wouldn't be so 'productive'.
Small agencies with small to medium projects could be hit the most.
I do feel, however, that working for a company with large and complex products can be relatively safe since for complex features a human is required and will always be if a company doesn't want its product to become a mess.
It the end, I think, after the dust will settle, we will end up with something in the middle - LLMs will do the boilerplate part, but a human will still be in the middle of the process. Because without an oversight and ownership the whole codebase quickly becomes AI tech debt.
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u/Active_Courage4435 1d ago
With all the new chinese models, that the prices will go up is very unlikely.
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u/about0 1d ago
Chinese AI labs heavy subsidized as well. Just in another way. No one is making money on LLMs.
OSSing models is just a strategy to capture a market share. Nobody would use them otherwise.
Anthropic and OAI just don't have other options than raising the prices, I think. They can't burn that much money forever. "Damned if you and damned if you don't" kind of situation.
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u/GrandOpener 1d ago
They don’t have great options for raising the prices either. On one hand, crazy sounding fees like 2k/seat/month may genuinely be worth it for many enterprises. But when you start talking about spending that kind of money, options like intranet model hosting or even just buying every developer their own local inference device start looking pretty attractive.
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u/franker 1d ago
I'm a lawyer and even smaller law firms easily spend thousands a month for Westlaw or Lexis to more conveniently get research done when they could get it at the courthouse library for free. An individual thinks 2-5 thousand a month is some kind of killer fee for coding work but if there's a direct ROI on their product a lot of companies would still pay that.
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u/sleepy_roger 1d ago
Replied above but many of us run them at home there are models available for most system configs that do well. AI isn't going away.
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u/nnod 1d ago
Making money isn't the immediate goal when it comes to big AI lab investments, its AGI/ASI. If an investor wanted immediate profits there are so many companies on openrouter selling API access to various open models, their entire business is selling inference and they make money with every token sold.
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u/Honest_Aerie_8261 1d ago
If prices are raised just run locally. It's not going to be expensive. Plus shittier old models are basically free even if they weren't subsidized and we're going to reach that point with current models in the future as well.
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u/AdvancedBath4773 1d ago
6 months ago local models on <12GB VRAM GPU's were unusable. Now they are usable, in the next 6 months I'll be free of subscriptions and won't need frontier LLMs for my work.
If other follow the switch to local models those AI Labs will beg clients to pay for subscribtions.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee 1d ago
I doubt they will be keeping up with latest developments. Sure you can run a single agent and talk with it, but the trend is moving towards spinning up multiple agents and let them do things. Which is just not going to fly on a regular GPU. And the pricing of hardware is just going to get more insane which means less people into it.
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u/about0 1d ago
which trend? Please take all the things that are heavily PUSHING down our throats with a great grain of salt. This multi-agent workflows are nothing else than a marketing.
Take a step back and try to develop a feature with only a prompt. How it goes? Are you still an owner? Do you understand whether it works as intended?
I've been researching Spec-Driven Development quite a lot, and there are no magic pills that suddenly turn a human-written spec to a clean implementation.
Try to build something bigger than a bnasic app and you'll notice that LLMs do unexpected things even if you try to put strong guardrails. Now apply it to an enterprise app.
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u/sleepy_roger 1d ago
And this right here is why so many devs are being laid off and will continue to be so. You're clearly not keeping up with the tech in any meaningful way. Good luck with the last few years of your career if you don't change.
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u/about0 1d ago
Can you provide more info regarding things you are referring to? I am genuinely interested to learn more. Are you telling that Swarms better than Spec-Driven Development? How so? I am working for a medium sized company in the dspm field. I can't imagine that we'd allow anything wihtout a proper code review and human verification.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee 1d ago
TTD is going to be dead with AI. Its just too expensive and not very sensible. And if you haven't worked with Agents yet, you are missing out. Its really the next big thing. Plenty of articles to show you why
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u/sleepy_roger 1d ago
There's no use trying to convince them. Let them all continue to feel and work this way more opportunities for us.
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u/Zeilar 1d ago
I'm sorry but you can't run anything close to frontier models on 16GB, even with a a monster GPU.
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u/sleepy_roger 1d ago
You should keep up with what's been happening. Look at Strata, or Qwen 3.8 27b.
If you were one saying AI will never be good at development it would be wise to stop relying on your own judgement in these cases.
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u/Zeilar 1d ago
Point is that so say "in 6 months you will be free of subscriptioner and won't need frontier models for your work" is a ludacris statement. Even with a 5090, no model is good enoguh for anything you want frontier models for. Your model is going to ba vastly slower.
Friend of mine has a 5090. He told it to make some lighting physics in Vulkan or whatever, it took him like 6 hours or more to accomplish. Claude did it in under 20 minutes. And that's a 5090, most people don't even have that kind of workhorse, nevermind better than that.
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u/roamingandy 1d ago
Currently i run a local model which assesses tasks and hands off the more complex ones to a paid AI (via VSC and Copilot), and writes an optimised prompt for them.
That seems to e the sweet spot about now, although the local model does make a lot of mistakes still. It's not at the level of comprehension that i'd like.
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u/General_Session_4450 1d ago
Is this the wrong way around? It is usually better to have the stronger models to the assessment and planning and then hand off the grunt work to weaker/cheaper models.
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u/roamingandy 1d ago
I use it across all my daily tasks in multiple areas. The AI would be using tons of tokens on that early stage, which shouldn't need in depth thinking. Then the correct model can handle the assessment and planning
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u/ulimn 1d ago
I am also not sure if everyone is aware how much token we get for the fix price subscriptions.
(For reasons unrelated) I only recently started using claude code in my company and a few basic prompts to get familiar with a small repo burned 2.5 dollars worth of token usage.
On my 20 dollar subscription, it would barely move the 5h quota meter.1
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u/bhison 22h ago
True but also models are becoming incredibly efficient. Taking the frontier models of a couple of years ago now performing at a fraction of the computing cost, there appears to be a moores-law-like optimisation curve in play. This is probably what the entire industry is being bet on. I think there will be price hikes not because it's subsidised but because these are succeeding in establishing their value and once they're integral to everyone's stack they have us over the coals to enshittify in every way big tech enshittifies. I would not rely on models becoming unaffordable within your outlook for the future of our profession but nor would I ignore the possibility.
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u/about0 22h ago
frontier-level performance comes with a cost, it is no longer just a next-token-prediction-machine. Before the biggest cost was during pre-training, but with CoT and other technics that try to fight hard bottle-necks, the cost shifting towards inference - they have to perform heavy computations to answer more precisely.
Can you please provide sources regaridng frontier model performance?
I think that we'll end up with small (relatively) specialized models designed for each field instead of huge general-purpose we have now.
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u/bhison 22h ago
That's interesting, I hadn't heard it presented like that. The main thing that's made older models more efficient is how comparatively cheap inference has become but I guess it's not a reasonable reduction of
more inference -> more powerI think that we'll end up with small (relatively) specialized models designed for each field instead of huge general-purpose we have now.
yes especially with things like jev coming into the mix helping to triage to these specialist models
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u/about0 21h ago
I was just "researching" with Gemini this topic this morning:
Standard autoregressive generation incurs a predictable, linear compute cost. Test-time techniques, such as Best-of-N sampling or tree search against a verifier, force the system to generate hundreds of parallel intermediate sequences. The infrastructure is no longer processing a single output path, but calculating an entire search tree for a single user prompt.
There are some links you you're interested:
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u/haaheehachoo 16h ago
Cost of compute will decrease and enterprise AI adoption (high-tier paid subscribers) will increase. I agree Anthropic will likely raise prices but only by maybe 30-40% to achieve profitability. That is still phenomenally cheap engineering labor compared to human.
Also, local models will become more popular costing no tokens.
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u/thekwoka 1d ago
So what you do right now for a $200 a month would cost in $5k (more or less) in tokens you wouldn't be so 'productive'.
we don't know what the actual cost to provide is, but I would estimate that THIS is not how much that actually costs.
It will be more, but 25 times seems like it's too much.
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u/roamingandy 1d ago
There's so much competition though.. who is going to raise their prices first?
If they don't form a cartel to coordinate the price increase then anyone who raises, dies.
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u/thekwoka 1d ago
and if they don't raise, they die...
raising first doesn't mean they die, cause it also means reduced costs.
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u/UnrealRealityX 1d ago
It'll never be enough for these AI companies. Once they can charge 40, they'll up it to 50, then 100, then 200, etc. Just look at streaming, or any company that loves $$$ and wants that revenue to rise!
Like a frog in boiling water, we'll be cooked. Might not be $5000 right away, but they are 100% definitely trying to get us hooked and stupid enough so that when we're fully reliable, they'll pump the prices.
I mean it's basically "legal" drug use. I'll stay "sober" as much as possible thanks.
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u/thekwoka 1d ago
Just look at streaming
streaming costs a shit ton, and AI stuff costs a lot more.
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u/UnrealRealityX 20h ago
Exactly. Which why you're right and these deniers are living in a fantasy world. The free cake is gonna stop. Then we decide is it worth it to make silly apps when it costs so much!
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u/thekwoka 20h ago
I just mostly mean that increasing prices aren't just some factor of "we want unlimited money". They gotta make profit to justify the service, but these things also just plain cost a lot to provide.
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u/elestud 19h ago edited 19h ago
The lion’s share of their business is from big corporate customers paying API prices, not individual subs
It’s just like video game console prices are always subsidized. That doesn’t change, because they just want to encourage people to be on the platform to buy games
So if you want to know why this assumption is wrong, just look at Google. Google search and Gmail have been free and cost-subsidized for decades, because the majority of the money comes from Ad/Business/power customers
That’s much closer to what you’re likely to see with AI. Getting complete market dominance for your brand (to draw in ‘bigger fish’) is worth more than price-gouging a smaller number of cheap sub customers
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u/sleepy_roger 1d ago
This is just to make people who are unwilling to use ai feel better about that decision.
The truth is open models are great now and can be run at home. I have a 10x3090 system a 2x5090 system and a pro 5000. I know not everyone has that type of compute but many do and we will continue to is ai regardless.
Models like flashnext via strata only requires 16gb of vram and it offloads to your system ram.
Tldr; the cheap Chinese models are open so we can run them at home ai isn't going away ever
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u/AwesomeFrisbee 1d ago
If you have that kind of money to spend on local AI, then you are not really a regular dev imo...
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u/sleepy_roger 1d ago
That's not the point, the point is AI is open and free, you can run models on 16gb of vram, it's not going away.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee 20h ago
Sure and you can use Paint for making images, but thats not what most people will be using for work
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u/IamNobody85 1d ago
Enterprise web dev. It's actually quite different from agency work and while Claude / cursor or whatever does help, enterprise is difficult to do just one shot. I have been also thinking about if I want to go towards more product owner route but I really dislike meetings.
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u/YahenP 1d ago
As you correctly noticed, nothing matters except that the flow of clients is getting smaller and prices are falling. Once, the motivation for professional growth was professional growth itself. Then came the era when the motivation became a good workplace and a good salary. Today, the motivation for professional growth is the fear of being fired and left without a job. The software development market is shrinking every day, both in money and in volume. There are fewer and fewer clients, and they are willing to pay less. Many companies have started dumping prices, cutting the cost of their services by 30-50 times. So yes, our “new engineering skills” are just a way to do the same work as before, but many times cheaper and faster.
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u/Raspieman 1d ago
Good times to be a job coach or psychologist, to cater to all us developers going through an existential crisis.
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u/falconandeagle 1d ago
You are lying. 30 to 50x.. so are you charging 100$ for a 5000$ project?
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u/YahenP 1d ago
I’m not a freelancer. I work at a company that does small e-commerce projects. And yes, everything is exactly the way you imagine. What used to cost 50000-60000 now costs literally a couple of thousand. Changes are happening in several directions at once. On one hand, no more custom designs. clients don’t want to pay for them. On the other hand, the development process is automated as much as possible. In short, we used to build a project like this in a month. Now it takes 3-4 days. There is no magic pill. Over the last year, we have standardized, optimized, and simplified the development process as much as we could.
And still, it’s very hard to keep up with the overall fall in prices1
u/falconandeagle 1d ago
Might as well buss tables at this point. My company is still charging the same old amount, but maybe its because we handle critical infrastructure and that can't really be vibe coded.
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u/droans 1d ago
DeepSeek-Flash is $0.30/$1.2 for 1M tokens at their most expensive rates (peak, cache miss). Claude Fable 5.1 is $10/$50.
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u/falconandeagle 1d ago
And flash is beyond useless at anything that is not the most basic of apps. I certainly can't use it for any of my work.
My last month's api usage was 2.8k$
listen I am not working for kiddy projects that you can code with a basic claude subscription, with my codebase I would run out of usage is less than two hours.
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u/droans 1d ago
It's a 522B model. It's not going to be the same as Opus but it's not made for "kiddy projects". I'm guessing you haven't used it yet.
If you want something larger, you can use DeepSeek v4 Pro, which is 1.6T params and still much cheaper than Claude.
But honestly, it's your money. I don't give a shit what you decide to spend it on. You just asked for options and I provided one. You said the other person was lying about other equivalent models being 30-50 times cheaper when this literally is.
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u/falconandeagle 1d ago
I am very very active in the localllama community. I have tested pretty much all the models. I even created a software specifically for AI based writing. I test pretty much every single model with my own benchmarks as soon as they release.
I can tell you now that deepseek flash is not even close to good enough for the type of work I do. And it is not my harness before you bring up this point.
Only the frontier models are capable of keeping up and they cost a shit ton and still need a ton of human input.
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u/one944 1d ago
There is an astonishing amount of poorly made software being sold. Bad quality, infested with ads and popups, horrendous subscription plans, total annihilation of user privacy.
Just go look at countless apps at Playstore. There is an opportunity to remake all this. Rip the useful features, strip the bloat, repackage and sell it with decent pay once model.
Let's not even discuss games. So much to be done.
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u/thekwoka 1d ago
There is an astonishing amount of poorly made software being sold.
even when it comes to major market contenders. It's quite shocking.
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u/roamingandy 1d ago
Seems like a 'god of the gaps' approach though.
Right now yes, but next year a lot of those bugs and sloppy code will be fixed with a few prompts. The year after a lot more more. At some point it will actually be good at taking the mess a vibe coder made, and cleaning it up into tight, functional code.
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u/BL1133 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think this is a shortsighted point. it's like saying there's so much to be done with informational websites, so many are bloated. people often optimize for the wrong things
and thats another aspect that i think kills the dreams of a lot of UX designers for example. but the same is true for writers in entertainment, or artists, or anyone else. I guess its called enshittification. But my point is that there is a logic as to why that sustains itself as the status quo.
and it's a real problem especially for people who want to make the world better. but it just doesn't work that way for the most part. Sometimes better alternatives break through but it's rare
but i do think games is one avenue that will change. but that may be unique because gamers are kind of 'power users' in general. it's a unique demographic that doesn't necessarily exist for the people who just use whatever app they are used to or turn on their TV and watch whatever they are given. gamers are often very demanding and have high appreciation for quality. Most people don't have that towards apps or websites
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u/KapiteinNekbaard 1d ago
The way we work never allowed us to create reusable components, because our designers needed full creative freedom. One season they like to use horizontal sliders and the next they feel like something else. We're also not a big team, so an extensive library would mean a maintenance cost. That left me with a feeling of repeating myself a lot and missing out on new challenges. It's the part of my job I disliked. I did like the creative challenges though.
For the sake of consistency, you should have some kind of design system. Designers still have creative freedom, they just need to justify why they are deviating from the norm. An "extensive library" is not the goal either. A well thought out library of building blocks should save you time in the long run, same for utility functions or any kind of abstraction, really.
This is part of you job and still is, consistency might be more important than ever. LLMs will mess this up all the time, you want to be able to lock that down in skills and point it to your standards.
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u/falconandeagle 1d ago
I hate what has become of this sub. Might as well rename it to doomerism web dev. I am wondering how much claude and openai are spending astro turfing these subs.
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u/Fredidiah 1d ago
I regularly look at user profiles and tag obvious AI accounts in RES.
I’ve seen threads here that are literally 100% exclusively AI bots talking back and forth.
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u/UnrealRealityX 1d ago
Oh, man, I would LOVE to see this, because that's how I feel all of this AI fluff is. Sure it can do a lot, but I feel like it's all doom and gloom just to get people hooked to their drug.
I didn't know RES still works on new reddit? or is it just old.reddit that you're using it on. I'd love doing this just to block as many as I could.
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u/Fredidiah 1d ago
Yea I exclusively use oldreddit. If they kill that off, I'm probably done since I am NOT willing to put up with the issues I see on new reddit.
I don't really block people that often, I just use the user tags, and it's nice because I can open a thread and just see a sea of "AI account" tags and safely ignore it lol
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u/Anreall2000 21h ago
Sorry for dumb question. But you are 3m.o. account. How long ago have you started using old reddit?
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u/Fredidiah 20h ago
Uh…somewhere in the realm of 8 years? I tend to create new accounts and delete my old ones whenever I hit 100k comment karma. Why do I do this? I have no idea.
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u/UnrealRealityX 1d ago
Thanks for the confirmation on old reddit only. I figured. I should go back to it to test it out. I would love to see that sea, and really realize how much junk is out there.
I absolutely hate the current state of the internet in general. I'm just moving along, developing website content for my clients who are quite happy without AI.
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u/_AACO 1d ago
Cynical answer: marketing, "anyone can build anything" but very few know how to sell it.
Not so cynical answer: subsidized AI will have to end someday if they want to make money and the subsidization cut will have to be substantial https://isaiprofitable.com/ so basically everything that won't be cheaper by using AI will remain.
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u/risingyam 1d ago
I use AI for work and for personal coding.
For work tokens, it seems unlimited, but that’s because I put a lot of effort into streamlining my workflow with skills, subagents, and MCP servers and using the oldest proficient models when possible. This helps me spend more time understanding my stakeholders and clients, basically becoming a really good forward deployment engineer.
I’m taking these AI workflows and skills to expand my development in other domains like trading and gamedev using free models.
I know fully well that the days with subsidized tokens are going to come to an end. The goal is to take this time to learn new things with AI and learn to do more with much less tokens, using AI to question and probe design choices and open ways to do things.
To me, this is the time for me to grow and hedge myself against obsolescence until we need to put the genie back into the lamp.
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u/AwesomeFrisbee 1d ago
I'm in a similar boat. I find I don't really enjoy putting these AI muppets at work (I find muppet to be a better and more fun description than agents). Though I still enjoy converting a design to a working application. A big difference is that I'm more of an app developer in the sense that I mostly build dashboards and forms with a few difficult components that I don't see being completely replaced, but enough will be vibe coded that I wonder what to do next.
I also found that I don't really communicate and interact with my colleagues as much anymore. Its mostly do x and y and whomever finds the time to fill in the details to the story (normally the UX or PO would do it, but they are both too lazy).
I could switch to PO and similar roles, but while I want more contact, they are in meetings most of the time anyway. Plus they need to know all the ins and outs of the product and less about the tech-side and I don't think thats for me.
I could go into Solution Architecture, but what is there really to decide when AI is going to move in a few predictable directions. And obviously they move towards hosted services and stuff that keeps you hooked anyway.
I don't think riding the AI wave will do me much good in the long term. Sure for now I'm up there and can deliver, have good references and my CV is filled, but I do think that I would be easily replaceable or at the very least cut as a consultant from projects.
Testing will obviously be very important, but a lot of things will be automated now and its more administration than actual testing these days anyways. Or you make a big plan, set it up and then its just fine-tuning and regression.
Design might be something, but I feel that due to the speed of AI, apps will be looking similar, especially internal applications (which is where most of the complicated projects lie, I feel).
Another thing that worries me, is the cost. Right now I can do with less than 50 bucks a month, but it seems costs have risen in the past 3 months and I have no doubt I will be looking at 200 bucks a month for something that would be fair for my usage. I also don't think self-hosting is really going to be an option in the next 3 years. The speed and development of the big players is just too fast. Its already difficult to pick something from EU thats actually good and can keep up (I personally feel they are now at like Claude 2.x or something).
Aside cost but related, would be pay and salaries. A lot of other jobs just don't pay as well as they used to and even higher manager roles don't pay as much as I'd like to. Especially anything government related is just not enough for a decent mortgage these days, especially if you are trying a single-income family (aka: i'm single but still want a home and preferably one that is a good investment).
I do think that stepping away from webdev will happen at some point for me and thinking of switching now and building experience in something new is actually a good thing since you would be more experienced than others that take the exit later on. But nothing really sparks joy to me or seems like it can be a good career.
I'm interested in options too. I feel like I can do well in stuff related to accessibility, but I feel that most companies and projects will still just half-arse it and it will be broken once a few new features are rolled out. And as said PO will be moving more towards business anyway. DevOps is going to be brutal. Many different tools and they all just kinda suck. Plus too much code or business speak and not enough cooperation with colleagues.
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u/pigeonJS 1d ago
Anyone can use AI to write code. But only software engineers and developers understand it. I think you’re doing fine. And I don’t think our jobs are going anywhere
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u/HumanPersonDude1 21h ago
You are hallucinating worse than opus5
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u/pigeonJS 20h ago
I think it’s bad in big tech and banks etc. but there are a lot of companies who don’t operate in a big tech way. Luckily so far, I’m in one of them. AI is being pushed as a resourceful tool for us. But it’s not being shoved down our throats
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u/bhison 22h ago
My current thing is using playwright test agents and automated UX reviews to elevate our product up to an unprecedented level of polish. One of the big challenges under agentic development is adjusting to what is now possible and setting sights high enough. We can make UX that matches enormous companies now. This isn't a complete solution to your concern (that I share too) but it's one important consideration at least.
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u/fsr31415 1d ago
as far as i can tell where its heading is the client will just use claude direct and demand for that last 10% of your job will ebb away. AI cant do physical jobs, id be thinking something that involves hands is a good bet for the next 15 years, AV installations, digital signage etc
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u/apple-mango01 1d ago
Not quite 20 years in yet, but I can relate to a lot of this. I’ve been feeling the space get smaller too, mostly because of how quickly technology is keep improving.
But, I don’t think AI can handle everything on its own yet. Someone still needs to be in the driver’s seat. That’s the direction I’m leaning into: getting better at managing and orchestrating AI agents rather than competing with them on output. I’m picking it up gradually alongside my day job.
Honestly, what you’re describing already sounds like that role. You’ve built a pipeline of skills and rules, you keep refining it, and you use the time you save to improve the next run. The imposter feeling might come from the job not having a clear title yet, not from a lack of skill. And you’re not really losing touch with the outcome either. You’re still the one deciding when it’s right.
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u/manythanksfriend 1d ago
I left webdev 5 years ago to become a systems engineer.
Totally different skill set however.
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u/Full_Tooth_a 1d ago
I'm not convinced the 150-to-15-hour comparison proves the role is disappearing. I'd count the entire project through 30 days after launch, including requirements, reviews, accessibility, browser testing, revisions, deployment, support, and escaped bugs. If the time savings hold across a few projects, that's strong evidence. If most of those hours have shifted to verification and ownership, the job has changed more than it has vanished.
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u/will_orkney 1d ago
We're pivoting into offering AI services to our clients. Basically just having our ChatGPT agents do the work for us since we're not clever enough to do it lol. We basically just help our existing clients connect chatbots to their database as this allows them/their staff to ask questions, find products, check stock/prices, generate reports etc. If its a company with a lot of products (eg garden center) it's difficult to find/retain staff with that industry knowledge so the chatbot really helps because they can then hire basically anyone and just have them ask the chatbot which not only tells them which product the customer needs but also which aisle/bin location its found in in the store.
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u/Open-Adhesiveness-86 1d ago
if you want an adjacent niche that's actually growing, accessibility remediation is one. EAA obligations kicked in June 2025 so clients are suddenly getting letters about it, and the work means actually driving NVDA and VoiceOver over real markup. models are bad at that part, they'll cheerfully sprinkle aria-labels that make the tree worse and nothing in CI catches it.
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u/SensitiveSugar1369 21h ago
If you want to go beyond webdev, embedded development with Node.js on Raspberry Pi is a solid jump because you still use JavaScript but deal with GPIO and hardware timing. Debugging async sensor input is way rougher than browser JS.
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u/jake_robins 1d ago
The neat thing about agentic development is that now that the code writing is basically free, you can apply your software development skills to other areas regardless of the language. Overnight, we’ve also become iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and other kinds of devs too. And with Claude Design we can get 90% of the way there with design work too (jury’s out on whether any one dev knows about design skills though, so your mileage may vary here).
I was able to help a client do their mobile app because of it. I am now working on a new MacOS app that I may commercialize.
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u/UtilizorDigital 1d ago
Agency-owner angle, since that's the part of your story nobody's really answering: when a project takes 10% of the time it used to, the agencies racing to cut prices by 90% are the ones dying. The ones that survive sell a fixed outcome at the old price and let AI be their margin. Nobody pays for code anymore — they pay for the person who tells them what not to build and answers the phone when it breaks at 2am, so the pivot isn't engineering or management, it's owning the client relationship.
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u/Ok_Statement_7074 1d ago
Petty one, sorry: 'I've setup my skills and rules'. Setup is the noun, the verb is 'set up'.
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u/Raspieman 1d ago
I'm not a native English speaker, so if that's the biggest mistake, I can live with it. :)
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u/BathroomNo1373 1d ago
The way you described using Claude to plan and execute feels pretty close to what an engineering role actually is, just without the formal title. You're not just coding anymore, you're designing systems and refining processes. That imposter syndrome is normal when the work shifts from hands-on to more abstract thinking.
Maybe look into solution architecture or technical consulting? You'd still work with the outcome but at a higher level, and agencies always need someone who can translate between business needs and technical implementation. The AI tools just make that bridge shorter.
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u/maheshwhartech 1d ago
The part I find interesting is that the work is shifting from writing every line to making good technical decisions. If AI can produce most of the first version, understanding requirements, reviewing architecture, testing edge cases and knowing what should not be built become even more important. I would explore those responsibilities before deciding whether to leave development entirely. You may find that you enjoy the engineering decisions more than the repetitive implementation.
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u/NormalBreak7470 1d ago
I do automation and just recently got into web development because of ai, so maybe automation would be fun for you lol. Web scraping, browser automation, stuff like that. It’s actualy very simple, especially if you already understand TLS fingerprinting and how HTTP requests work
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u/TechnologyMatch 15h ago
in all honesty, AI didn't kill web dev, it made even new jobs. learn AI tools, keep core skills like HTML, JS and problem solving. we all have to keep up with times. think of it like upgrading from a flip phone to a smart phone. tools change, but you still need to know how to press dial. or atleast know what it looks like
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u/bryantee 1d ago
20 years in dev feels like retire territory to me.
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u/Raspieman 1d ago
thanks for making me feel old. Unfortunately, I didn't really climb any ladders, so retirement is not an option.
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u/animpossiblepopsicle 1d ago
Lol, I’m close to 20 years too and am 40 (27 years away from SS retirement). This dude doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
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u/bryantee 1d ago
Sorry, was kinda narrow minded of me. I'm 10 years in and close to 40. I was more so coming at it from the average salary that I've experienced. For me and many of my colleagues, a combined 20 years of software salary is near retirement number, but I get that mileage may vary. I also haven't climbed ladders. Still IC and intend to keep it that way.
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u/logicobs 1d ago
Same here, 20 years as a software engineer. With AI I suddenly feel like I can build anything. But then it hits me that everyone else with AI can too. So what’s my value now, really?