I’ve written way too much about genAI, like a few other people I have a dedicated /ai slashpage on my site with my stance.
But I will echo what I said to someone on Mastodon that suggested noncoders use LLMs for their webdev work:
Programming and web development are challenging and require a lot of time and effort to learn, but so does good writing.
I think there is a learned helplessness and self-limiting beliefs about technical aptitude (eg. people who self-identify as “not being a math person”).
And I think this is by design. If a large majority of people believed they had the technical capacity to be autonomous from corporate tech it would cost entire industries.
Setting up a SSG blog can be as simple as forking an already-existing theme, pressing a few buttons on Netlify, and writing out Markdown plain text posts.
Even more importantly, I’d much rather see “poorly” designed websites by humans than nicely designed ones where the creator has no idea what’s going on under the hood because they’re forfeited that to generative AI.
100%! I don’t begrudge webdev novices who choose to use LLMs, but I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in entering this space to learn how to do it with human assistance instead. There is tremendous value in learning how to do something for yourself, and reaching out to others for ideas when you get stuck.
Yes, it takes time to learn how to build websites, but the satisfaction you feel when you figure out how to manipulate code to do what you want it to do is unparalleled. It’s also quite literally better for your brain health. Actively learning new skills and building upon them throughout your life is so important. You learn absolutely nothing when you offload a novel (to you) task to an LLM.
Honestly that’s what I think in general too. I think there’s a lot of personality in flaws, and recently I’ve been on a downward spiral bc more than one person suggested I took an UX/UI design course to work in the field (I’ve been struggling to find jobs in my current line of work) and that gave me major ick… I don’t wanna learn about it, I love my crunchy websites just the way they are, I don’t want to be infected with modern aesthetics for increased sales performances. :(
And this is honestly kind of comforting, bc sometimes it does feel like everyone is a professional and/or learned everything there is to know super quickly and here I am… struggling on the basics. But I have a very limited time to learn. I’m also not competing with anyone, and I’m not in a rush. I gotta stop thinking like a crazy person.
Exactly. One thing you need to remember is that a lot of us have been doing this for a very long time! I built my first website in the late 90s. I was a pre-teen back then, and I knew absolutely nothing about code. I learned by following tutorials, asking questions on forums, and just tinkering around to see what would happen. I learned from my accomplishments and from my mistakes. I didn’t have much free time to learn, either. I worked on my sites after I finished my homework.
It’s not a race. Learning how to code and figuring out solutions to problems you encounter on your own will serve you so much better in the long run than outsourcing all of that to Claude. Courses are (mostly) just a hoop to jump through as a precursor to employment in the field; everything you actually need to know about HTML/CSS/JS is already on the internet. You don’t have to apply what you learn in those courses to your personal websites if you don’t want to, but you may still gain something useful out of them beyond the certificate.
The part about stackexchange is very true: it really is not beginner friendly. However, this does make me think that a publicly accessible, googleable) forum for beginner questions or smallweb tech advice could be good to have. I know we already have one on this forum, but afaik it requires a login (? I never view this site logged out tbf lol), which may make it so people who need it don’t find it. Maybe a moot point because I can’t make it at the moment, but it’s something that may be worth thinking about!
As far as I recall from when we set this forum up, the webweaving / help categories are publicly viewable and indexed by search engines, and everything else is not. This was specifically to help build a better place to land when searching for stuff about websites while also keeping our forum relatively safe.
I use RSS to keep up with the forum so I’m not often active in the General section for this reason (discourse still hasn’t let users make API keys for authenticated rss feeds)
