Comment by berkes
6 days ago
Ah yes Dreamweaver. Look how well that turned out.
Turs out people don't want "quick dump as HTML" but rather "maintainable, understandable, performant HTML". I don't see how that has changed with AI.
6 days ago
Ah yes Dreamweaver. Look how well that turned out.
Turs out people don't want "quick dump as HTML" but rather "maintainable, understandable, performant HTML". I don't see how that has changed with AI.
Dreamweaver was a widely used tool back in the day and definitely started a trend in web design tools.
It certainly did. It was the OG of "no-code" or "low-code".
But like no-code or low-code, the niche in which it's useful to a business is limited. I commonly say that if software (esp FLOSS) serves even only one person well, it's a success. By that criteria, it was massively successfull.
But 27 years later, we are still mostly writing "html" (or jxl, or whatever todays frontendframework has come up with) by "hand". Or writing code that churns out this HTML for us. And not dragging around stuff in Dreamweaver.
Some figma-export will serve niches, some of which I probably cannot imagine even. Prototyping, one-offs, cousin-erik-building-james-craft-brewery-site, etc. But even combined with generative- or transformative AI, it won't serve as the source for UI "code".
If by “people” you mean “developers”, then yes you’re right. But I don’t think anyone else ever really cared.
The problem with Dreamweaver is that you still needed a developer to upload and run the site. And back then, you couldn’t run single page applications (web stacks hadn’t evolved that far yet), so still needed developers to write the backend.
Thus there wasn’t a huge amount to gain in using Dreamweaver for the professional world.
AI has changed that in that it doesn’t have the same limitations as Dreamweaver. However, like yourself, I don’t think we’ll see AI replace developers. Or at least the current crop of LLMs still have a long way to go before they can be used without developer oversight.
Edit: also worth noting that Flash was everywhere back then too. So many web designers opted for Flash instead.
I actually do see developers being replaced by AI. But only certain roles and only after it solves the issues that e.g. Dreamweaver did not solve.
Building stuff from scratch is easy. AI can do it, dreamweaver could, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, etc.
Maintaining legacy isn't. AI isn't there yet: at most it can replace existing with new, but it cannot "understand" context, history, The Reason Why Kevin Built This Weird Unintelligable Abstraction, or how the three different ways of validating an email are actually a business requirement.
Let alone building stuff that withstands the decay of real constraints and time.
I've been around long enough (30+ years software dev/engineer) to have seen this decay over and over and to know what works and what doesn't (It's a people issue, hardly a technical one).
I've never seen AI, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, or any low- or no-code tool, amongst which Dreamweaver, churn out something that's easy to change, maintainable for months, years, decades.
There's software that gets a few hours a year of attention and keeps running, securely, performant. That can be picked up, changed or added to and deployed in hours. And there's software that will explode the moment you even glance at the files, let alone anyone fixing, updating, or g*d forbid, adding features to.
AI generated stuff almost exclusively falls in the last category. And we don't have anything AI around yet that can do this fixing, updating, adding features for us.
So currently it successfully replaces many of the code monkeys, fiverr-freelancers and junior devs churning out forever-greenfield-projects. But little else.
Sure, but I’ve seen plenty of senior co-workers deliver a pile of dynamite in Java and get a bonus for it, abandoning it to some other poor sod who will have to fix and maintain it. Managers who reward that behavior will probably be the ones who try to AI Everything, and it’ll probably work for just long enough to make all the devs redundant.
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