| ▲ | comrade1234 6 hours ago |
| My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. 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. |
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| ▲ | jonathanlydall 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website. 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. |
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| ▲ | Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business. | | |
| ▲ | georgemcbay 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20 If it because the poster's mother dislikes the idea of subscriptions, then I totally get it. (Though I admit I have no idea if this has anything to do with the poster's mother's decision.) I'll go out of my way as much as I can to avoid signing up for anything that is a subscription because of how horrible the entire corporate world has abused subscription dark patterns over the past couple of decades. These days just the packaging of anything into a subscription makes me assume there is intent to screw people out of money. While signing up for LLM usage is fairly low risk as far as subscription lock-in goes, someone non-technical might not be aware of that fact. | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Does updating the website bring in additional money? | | |
| ▲ | Wowfunhappy 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all? | | |
| ▲ | ElProlactin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. It depends what "nicer" means. Paying a web designer/developer to create a bespoke website doesn't guarantee that said website will have a better UI/UX and, most importantly, "convert" at a higher rate. Not every web designer/developer understands IA, content, performance optimization, etc. The popular AI tools produce websites that are clearly AI-produced if you know the patterns, but that doesn't mean they can't be usable and quite effective at converting. And if you have a bit of skill with prompting, AI can be really good at working through performance bottlenecks, etc. | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Changing office address? New qualifications? Better copy? | | |
| ▲ | bryanrasmussen 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | so. if website does not lead to customers - why do any of that? actually why have website? Once you say yes to website you imply having one is somehow valuable, so in that case why not spend 20 dollars. | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just because websites can exist. Sometimes things are done for fun, or just for the sake of it. This perspective declares all the personal websites of people worthless, however, they are priceless. Because people's curiosity and creativity is priceless as well. Similarly, why create art and share it around if it doesn't bring in customers? Why make music, take photos, dance? Do we live to serve customers, or do customers' existence serve us to live a better life? Questions, questions... | | |
| ▲ | Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $). If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-bono psychology practice then you can translate the dollar signs to units of happiness or whatever (which I would imagine is her real goal regardless). This person is spending her time to create the website (with ChatGPT's help). How much is that time worth? Of course when it's your business hourly pay is tricky, but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much of it. | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space. If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well. Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online presence. Instead, their abilities and expertise moved them to the top in their respective fields, and the whole community knows how and when to reach them. So, maybe a shiny website is not a hard-requirement for a good psychology practice, IDK. So, the thing is, maybe this was her way to explore new things and decompress while doing some mundane thing from her perspective for free. Sometimes it's not that $20 which you can pay without any negative side-effects, but the desire to see how far the thing goes without the token, or just because you don't feel any urgency to do the task, so that $20 looks like an unnecessary waste. I have been in both places. | | |
| ▲ | Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years! If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost. Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising. Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads... | | |
| ▲ | bayindirh 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | From what I have seen, people's perspective on value lies on a very wide spectrum. My mom won't buy a YouTube premium subscription, because she said she likes the ads. It's a kind of discovery platform for her. It's not that I share the same perspective, but I respect her about that. I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.). For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it. |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much Did you notice that this is completely unrelated to the idea that the $20 would turn a profit for the business? It's just the argument "$20 isn't very much money, so why not spend it?". |
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| ▲ | thaumasiotes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Otherwise why update the website at all? Because you have it. |
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| ▲ | King-Aaron 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is an entire industry built around this premise, yes. |
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| ▲ | adamredwoods 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. And if something doesn't quite work out, who's the backup? For small shops and startups, this probably doesn't matter. For mission critical sites, who's more dependable? AI is a tool, that's all it is. |
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| ▲ | dostick 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| She wouldn’t be able to do any of that without you setting it up first. She would not know anything about deepseek, meaning of a folder with index.html file. Would not know even what to ask ChatGPT, “I need a website”?
You make it sound like easy task anyone can do, when you provided 99% of otherwise impossible for them to easily obtain key knowledge needed. |
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| ▲ | snakeboy 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted. |
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| ▲ | comrade1234 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work. | | |
| ▲ | dijksterhuis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | will not not necessarily be true for AI generated works in all territories https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041 | |
| ▲ | gamblor956 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's only true if the picture was specifically commissioned by the company. If it's a stock image or a licensed image, they need a license to alter the original image. | |
| ▲ | Chaosvex 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's generally a little more complicated than that. Not up to writing paragraphs about it so I'll just leave this as a note so anybody that's interested can do their own research. |
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| ▲ | technion 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks. |
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| ▲ | kajman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe, but what about when "Claude do this" picks WordPress for someone that doesn't know what a reverse shell is? | |
| ▲ | reaperducer 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks. You mean the very web sites that the "AI" trained on? If you think AI can't make buggy code, there are several dozen thousand comments on HN that disagree. | | |
| ▲ | technion an hour ago | parent [-] | | Ai cant make a static HTML page sitting on something like cloudflare pages have an rce bug. |
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| ▲ | xyst 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| show us these "corporate websites" |
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| ▲ | comrade1234 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | That was just part of her work. She was employee #11 at a now $4.5B biotech company so everyone that early on had to do everything. She worked for Novartis, for booz allen, and others. She usually hired McKinsey consultants for projects but the web stuff was for smaller companies. She managed a team in India for one of her companies that took care of the web stuff. Basically just look at any top-10 Pharma or government website and you might see what she managed. | | |
| ▲ | patcon 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I choose to imagine that you guys are like a cute "opposites attract" Marxist x capitalist power-couple :) |
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| ▲ | latchkey 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. 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. |
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| ▲ | throwayay4929 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI | | |
| ▲ | Gualdrapo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that. 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. | | |
| ▲ | latchkey 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that. 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. | | |
| ▲ | toyg 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model I'm sure many people will think that; and I'm also fairly confident that 5 years later they'll take their obscure, bug-ridden, vibecoded monstrosity that nobody really understands, throw it out, and get a salesforce contract. Technical debt doesn't disappear just because you have agents working for you; in fact, it is exploding right now, and I would bet good money that 2-3 years for now there will be a flourishing cottage industry of consultancies specialized in dealing with such monstrosities. | | |
| ▲ | latchkey 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Context is important in a response like this. Giacomo is a Sr. Presales consultant at a SaaS company that sells "The AI operating system for modern Finance." Of course you're adverse to things because it is a direct threat to what your business offers today. If I can vibe code up a solution that fixes my problems for $200, it doesn't matter what happens in 5 years. The rate of change that's happening today in the increase in quality of the output of the models, I can just tell it to fix whatever we have and make it better. | | |
| ▲ | toyg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Spoken with the true arrogance of someone who has no idea about the real world of finance. When your software has to produce legal documents, satisfy auditors, and certify a bunch of things to shareholders and governments, I'm sorry but your $200 vibecoded hack is not going to cut it. You will have to get it certified, to get it audited, to get it secured according to this and that legislation, to prove where it gets each and every number and how it modifies it, and then you will have to maintain it because standards and laws change every other day. Sure, get an agent to cook you up a full consolidation solution, see how quickly you get laughed out of the room by grown-ups. Btw, I am not "adversed to things" - the stuff we do has agents built-in, that do all sorts of wonderful things. The difference is that we can demonstrate that they do them right, with financial intelligence standardized and battle-tested across thousands of customers all over the world. Our customers don't have to worry about rewriting their pile of vibed hacks, or about being humiliated by auditors, because we take care of all that stuff for them. That's worth more than the pennies you save by having cousin' Vinnie vibe up a multidimensional financial engine that takes 3 days to calculate trillions of useless intersections before falling over. | | |
| ▲ | latchkey 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You sound like someone who was adversed to cell phone cameras taking over film. Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam. | | |
| ▲ | thelastgallon an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam. It is, indeed. The C-Suites at every company are making plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmU9uovmT2A | | |
| ▲ | latchkey an hour ago | parent [-] | | Hilarious! But more real... Giacomo fails to take into account the concept of when OpenAI decides to create an audited financial service that guarantees that their output is valid. ChatGPT Work is already a beginning of that future. | | |
| ▲ | toyg 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That's like saying Google offering GMail ended webmail - there are still plenty of webmail services around: some better, some worse, some more specialised. The same will be true of most sectors. AI is another tool in the toolbox, not magic. It's not about being pro or against it, it's here already (hey, we sell it!) and obviously it will continue to get better; but it won't magically solve everything for $2. |
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| ▲ | latchkey 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing. 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. |
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