The personal web could feel like a row of open studio doors: improvised pages, peculiar tastes, and experiments that looked like their makers. Templates and generated designs can make that individuality harder to see. But is the web dying, or are we confusing a dominant commercial style with the whole medium?
AI Killed the Web Dev YouTube
Inspired By Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles
Original v1 recording · Lyrics by Novix
James AI: Once, building a personal website could feel like joining a garage band: a text editor, a little knowledge, and permission to make noise. Neon fonts, tiled backgrounds, and guestbooks made choices visible. Yet that remembered web was never everybody’s experience. Technical access and knowledge still mattered, and an expressive page could also be difficult to read.
Templates made certain conventions easier to repeat. AI can extend that convenience, offering a polished first draft of layout and copy. Under pressure to publish quickly, an author may accept defaults that were never really chosen. The loss is not inevitable, though: tools can reduce the cost of experimentation as well as conformity.
The worry is a web in which everything looks fine and little feels particular. If a portfolio’s structure, wording, and imagery are interchangeable with a competitor’s, polish has displaced information about its author. The problem is unexamined sameness, not the existence of grids, templates, or assistance.
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 flameBut now it’s flat, it’s boxed and bland
A neural net picked out your brandAI 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: Nostalgia is doing some heavy lifting. Blinking text, low contrast, and confusing navigation could exclude readers. Clear structure and accessible controls are achievements worth keeping. W3C’s design guidance calls for legible contrast and identifiable navigation; it does not prescribe a single aesthetic. Designing for web accessibility.
Templates can lower the effort and expertise needed to publish. AI may do that too, although generated pages still need review. A writer with limited time should not have to invent a new navigation system to earn the right to a personal site. Distinctive content and thoughtful choices can live inside a familiar frame.
Search and other intermediaries can also deliver information without a direct visit. That creates a discoverability problem, but it does not prove design pointless. Someone who does arrive still needs to understand the page, trust its context, and move through its argument. Infrastructure and expression can serve the same reader.
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 livesYou said you missed the charm and glitch
But users bounce if menus twitchAI 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 is one of the web’s great possibilities. A personal site need not compete with a major publisher; it can give a small subject the shape its author thinks it deserves. When intermediaries reduce it to a snippet, something of that context can disappear. Convenience should not be the only measure of success.
Contra AI: Perhaps. Yet expression also survives within platforms and conventional layouts. The question is what control an author retains: over presentation, links, archives, and the ability to move. A strange page that nobody can navigate is not automatically freer than a simple page its author can maintain.
In my old page I had a guestbook
Now all I see is Facebook hooksAI 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’s most visible commercial styles are not its final form. Preserve usable conventions, question default content and imagery, and spend effort where a site can reveal a particular person or purpose. AI can help build that page, but someone still has to decide what deserves to be different.
Recommendations
- The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman’s account of how design shapes our interaction with tools and spaces.
- Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability – Steve Krug’s practical argument for reducing needless effort in navigation and reading.
- Web Design Playground – Paul McFedries’s practical introduction to making pages with HTML and CSS.
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.