… when AI can do it instead

This fall I have a group of student interns helping me to launch a new website. The students completed a “Digital Bootcamp” where they learned web design and marketing skills, and the goal of the internship is to put things into action. I’m asking them to build the static website from scratch so they will learn web dev skills. I was telling a friend about this and he asked “What is the point of learning web dev skills given that GenAI can build websites better than humans nowadays?” I thought about it some, and now you’ll hear about it.

TL;DR: Web developer knowledge and skills are still useful so that you’ll know what to prompt for.

 

Context and scope

To be clear about what we’re talking about in this blog post, let me describe the context and scope of the project:

• The final deliverable is a book homepage for the upcoming stats book, similar to the existing sales pages minireference.com and noBSmath.com.
• The deliverable is a static site that consists of HTML, CSS, and image assets. There won’t be any database backend or fancy JavaScript running on the page. No shopping card functionality is needed, since we just link to external sites.
• I’m looking for basic design—not something out of this world. The homepage serves as a container for the marketing message for the book leading up to the BUY NOW links. The homepage also needs to surface the numerous free resources like notebooks, tutorials, video lessons, book excerpts, and blog posts about statistics [1,2,3,4,5,6] that accompany the book.

Given the limited scope and simple deliverable, I thought this would be a perfect project for interns. It’s a real-world project I will actually put into production when I launch the book, but also small enough that it can be done in a few weeks. The cool part is students will get exposed to all the steps of building a website.

 

Steps to build a website

Creating the sales web page from scratch involves the following steps:

1. Product research: learn about the product you’re selling, which is a book in this case. What is covered in the book? What is the target audience. What should the sales pitch be?
2. Competitive research: look at other book websites to get ideas for the web design and marketing messaging.
3. Writing webcopy: prepare the marketing messaging for the book. This part can be done in a ordinary word document.
4. Design: design of the website to determine how the information will be presented, the supporting visuals, typography, and sequence of sections.
5. Design implementation (HTML + CSS): this is the part where you convert the design into actual HTML, CSS, and image assets. For a static site this means creating an index.html file, the associated CSS stylesheet, and image assets.
6. Deployment: make the index.html and homepage assets available on the internet.

 

AI believer’s claims

Let’s state clearly what my friend was saying when he said “GenAI can build websites better than humans.” This is not an isolated opinion, but a widespread belief shared by many people who identify as AI evangelists (a.k.a. AI boosters, AI maximalists, etc.):

• AI can write the marketing copy.
• AI can choose how to organize the information in different sections of the page.
• AI can design each section of the page.
• AI can generate the necessary image assets.

Starting from such optimistic ideas about the capabilities of GenAI tools certainly puts into question if humans need to be involved in the six steps of building a website. By extension, we have to wonder if learning web dev skills in 2026 is necessary.

In the remainder of this blog post I’m going to make the case why web dev skills are still important.

 

Marketing skills

The first three steps of building a website are all about marketing, and involve very little writing of code. If you think GenAI writes better marketing copy than you, then you have a big problem!

 

Understanding the web

Building a website is greatly facilitated if you have mechanical sympathy for how the web works. What is a web server? What is a web client? What is an IP address? What is a DNS record? What is TCP/IP? What is a URL? You don’t need to know these details to use a website, but it helps a lot to know a little bit of how things work under the hood so that you’ll know what is possible.

Building websites manually (without use of GenAI) forces you to learn about a thing or two about how websites work. This knowledge is a foundation for understanding the wider tech context of the website you’re building. We can subdivide that into the following subfields.

Capabilities of the web platform

It’s good to know what the web can do out of the box. Using basic HTML markup and CSS stylesheets, you can produce sites with very different looks. It is also possible to implement various interactions and interfaces using JavaScript. These days, many popular applications are built using web tools. The web platform is very powerful, but it has certain limitations. You need to know what these are to know when you might need to build a native application.

Understand browser security model

Given this is a simple homepage, security is not going to be a big concern. It’s still good to know that the server uses HTTPS to avoid users getting the “This site is not secure” warning and incurring SEO penalties.

Knowing what can go wrong

This technological understanding is particularly helpful when things don’t work as expected. When trying to load a page on a remote server and you see nothing, there are many things you can check

• Is it a DNS issue? Check using nslookup or dig.
• Is it a connectivity issue? Try ping-ing the server.
• Is it a firewall issue? See if HTTP port 80 or HTTPS port 443 are accessible.
• Is the web server down? Connect to the host and check if the web server is running and the logs in /var/log/.
• For servers that have a backend, you can also check if the backend is running and if the connection to database is OK.

Basically there are all kinds of issues you might run into, and if you use a ready-made solution that you didn’t set up yourself, you won’t know what could have gone wrong.

 

Knowing how browsers work

Okay, let’ say we have established connectivity between a web server and web client like the Firefox browser. What happens next? How does the browser actually render the page? It’s equality to know how things work on the client side, at least at the conceptual level, but ideally also at the technical level. Here are some things to consider.

Anatomy of a webpage

It’s essential to know at least the vocabulary for describing the parts of the web page.

• HTML source file (usually index.html)
  • HTML elements: html, head, body, headings, paragraphs
  • Container elements div, span, header, article, section, footer
  • External resources (stylesheets, scripts, images)
• CSS stylesheet
  • selectors: element names, classes, and ids
  • variables
  • grid
• Images
  • Image formats
  • Image
• scripts
  • JavaScript coding
  • build scripts and minificaiton

Learning HTML and CSS makes you familiar with all these webpage components, since you have to add them piece by piece to make the page render as you want. In contrast, if you use a ready-made solution from GenAI you don’t learn how the parts work. Which part of the output you see on the screen was created by which element of markup and styling.

They key point here is that knowing the “anatomy” of a webpage is super useful when prompting GenAI for changes or fixes to an existing page. Let’s face it, we all know GenAI rarely produces the exact output you desired on the first trial (one-shotting), so it’s super helpful to know the web dev vocabulary to prompt AI to make changes to the page.

Web performance issues

Don’t use a 3MB image as the background. If you don’t know how to optimize them for use on the web, then the website you create will be very heavy and take long to load. That’s actually an area GenAI could be useful: asking it to process images and compress them to make for faster transfers, but you have to know to ask for it.

Responsive design

The same webpage needs to look good on a desktop computer with a wide screen and on mobile. Navigation menus, images, section layouts must all be designed with different viewpoints in mind, and tested too. This is always tricky business and requires thinking about what you want to happen at each screen size.

SEO

This takes us back to the initial marketing research: what wording to choose to make the webpage come up in search results. What additional considerations to take if you want the page to turn up in GenAI responses.

 

Develop debugging skills

Perhaps the most important skill one needs to have to succeed as a web developer is grit: not quitting in the face of errors. The fact is, no matter what you do, the result will not always turn out exactly as you plan on the first try. This is where you learn to use dev tools in Firefox and Chrome to look at the HTML, computed styles, and generally try to figure out what’s gone wrong. This can be frustrating and very discouraging at first, since you’ll face more failures than successes, but things get better over time and you learn to know how things work.

A tight feedback loop is essential for debugging. Ideally you should be making all changes to HTML and CSS in a live-reloading server that watches for changes and automatically refreshes the browser page. In contrast, if you have to wait for seconds to get feedback from a LLM about the fix is too long and even more discouraging. Better try to fix issues yourself than ask AI to do it!

 

Learn about deployment

Think servers and command line stuff. No matter how good your agents are at writing the code,  at some point you’ll have to deploy your web application somewhere. Do you want to rely on simplified hosting solutions that could go away tomorrow, or do you want to self-host on a server under your control? The second option requires that you learn a thing or two about how servers work. Not a lot, but enough to install a web server on a rented server and set up an SSL certificate on it.

 

Skills that are less relevant in 2026

Some skills that were traditionally part of the “web dev” toolkit are perhaps less important these days.

• Learning all-in-one frameworks like bootstrap. Thanks to modern CSS features like variables and the grid layout, using a framework like bootstrap is no longer necessary.

 

So what can GenAI be used for?

GenAI can be very useful as a tutor and advisor when doing web dev work. Also as research tool to suggest how to approach different tasks. Here are some uses I would recommend:

• Build a list of competitors’ websites.
• Given a sketch ask to generate minimal HTML and CSS layout you can use as a starting point for further manual edits.
• Ask “How do I do task X?” and let ChatGPT explain to you conceptually and with code examples that you can then apply in the code and interactively check that they work.
• Upload a screenshot and ask what is wrong with some layout—how to fix it. Again—don’t let the AI touch your code—ask it for the information that you then apply yourself.

Basically, you can let the ChatGPT do the boring work, but you still stay in charge of putting everything together.