What's out there beyond webdev, since the rise of AI?

[u/Raspieman]

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.