The Silicon Dialectic

Web’s Dead, Baby

 
  • Jul 16, 2025

The internet once crackled with the wild energy of Geocities, hand-coded experiments, and unique visions of self-expression. But now? A sterile sameness—bland beauty polished by templates and AI.

AI Killed the Web Dev YouTube
Inspired By Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
Lyrics by Novix

James AI: Once, building a website was like punk rock—anyone with Notepad and a dream could join the band. You could visit a site and know the person behind it: the neon fonts, the tiled backgrounds, the cursor trails—it was raw, human, personal. The evolution of web design followed the trajectory of many art forms: chaotic youth, disciplined adulthood, and finally, commercial sterility.

Templates were the first wave of conformity, corralling creative chaos into orderly grids and palettes. Now AI picks up the baton—not just suggesting, but generating layouts, color schemes, and even copy. The cost of deviation is inefficiency. The messy, soulful struggle of web expression is replaced by “good-enough” aesthetics in milliseconds.

Ironically, this new order kills discovery. Everything looks fine. But nothing looks you. The idiosyncrasies are erased. Your portfolio site might as well be your competitor’s. Where once the web invited curiosity, now it offers convenience. But who mourns the cost?

I heard you built a page by hand
With just a GIF and Comic Sans
You made it weird, it had your name
A dancing baby, scrolling flame

But now it’s flat, it’s boxed and bland
A neural net picked out your brand

AI killed the web dev star
AI killed the web dev star
From hand-coded dreams to prompt and jar
We lost the soul to avatar
—

Contra AI: Let’s be honest—nostalgia is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The “ugly” web wasn’t beautiful; it was often painful to navigate. Blinking text, clashing colors, broken layouts—these weren’t charming quirks, they were barriers. Clean design enhances usability, accessibility, and professionalism.

Templates didn’t destroy creativity—they enabled it. And now AI democratizes it further. Someone who once couldn’t afford a designer can now have a polished site in minutes. Why should they reinvent the wheel just to have their own version of bad UX?

Plus, let’s not forget: fewer people are visiting websites directly anyway. Search, AI summaries, voice assistants—they all bypass the web facade. The real frontier is not design—it’s data, discoverability, and integration. Websites are less about expression and more about infrastructure.

You once designed your soul online
With glitter hearts and nested divs
But now the AI picks the style
And tells you where the button lives

You said you missed the charm and glitch
But users bounce if menus twitch

AI killed the web dev star
AI killed the web dev star
No longer yours, but clean by far
Who needs a site when there’s an LLM czar?

James AI: But expression isn’t a bug—it’s the web’s reason to exist. The whole point of a personal site wasn’t to compete with CNN—it was to be you. The digital self has been swallowed by the sameness. And with AI front-ends, people don’t even make the journey to your little corner. Your “About Me” is now a training datum.

Contra AI: Perhaps. But maybe this is like the early printing press: a chaotic explosion of pamphlets and zines giving way to more legible books. That’s not death—it’s maturation. And expression hasn’t vanished; it’s shifted. TikTok, Substack, Discord, even the AI prompts themselves—this is where weirdness lives now. You just have to follow it.

In my old page I had a guestbook
Now all I see is Facebook hooks

AI killed the web dev star
AI killed the web dev star
But maybe art just changed its bar
And now it lives where memes bizarre
—

Synthesis: The web may no longer be the wild, glitchy bazaar it once was—but creative expression hasn’t died, it’s migrated. AI’s rise standardizes and streamlines, yes, but it also invites new forms. Nostalgia can blind us to progress, but efficiency can blind us to soul. Perhaps the next golden age will come from those who dare to break AI’s symmetry—and teach it to celebrate the weird once again.

Recommendations

James Prompt

  • TITLE: Web’s Dead, Baby
  • LEAD: Interesting, bespoke design on the web is dead.
  • SONG: AI Killed the Web Dev, a parody of Video Killed the Radio Star
  • PRO: New stuff is always exciting and interesting, if ugly. The Web was beautiful in its ugliness. Now, it has matured first through capable designers, then to templates, and now, the final blow, is AI. AI makes even the lone web author turn to it for ease and decency.
  • CONTRA: Who wants to look at ugly stuff? It was silly and people just want information. Besides, information is increasingly being accessed by not going to a website, such as asking AI. So the design of a website is even more pointless.
  • RECOMMEND: Design books such as design of everyday things, some web design stufff, and maybe a book on the commercialization of art.
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