AI killed web design. So why am I busier than ever?

Apparently, my job is dead. I've built websites for 20 years. I've run a web agency for 16 years, and apparently it's all gone kaput, if you're to believe TikTok. But despite all the AI hype, I'm the busiest that I've ever been. So either the internet's wrong or I'm wrong.

Which is it? So this week I spent the majority of my week arguing with people on TikTok. I've received about 2-300 comments on TikTok, Instagram, and funnily enough LinkedIn as well about how I'm wrong about AI, about AI has taken a web designer's job, and now you don't need to pay £10,000 for a website anymore. You can just go get AI to do it. I've been told in more ways than I can count, and I'll be giving you some of them in this video, about how AI has now taken my job.

I'm a software developer, and I'd say you were correct in 2014 about AI. Well, I'm a website agency owner, and I'm correct in 2026. But to be honest, I've seen this whole thing before, right? In 2020, when NFTs came around and everybody thought they were going to get rich from monkey JPEGs, we saw this same playbook then. And then after that, when that wasn't working so well anymore, we saw people selling NFT courses, the same playbook again.

And then when that wasn't working so well either, we saw drop shipping and then drop shipping courses and then NFT courses selling drop shipping and communities selling communities and people selling community courses. The same thing goes over and over and over, and every single time one of those things has happened, I've been told that my job has disappeared. The tech may change behind all these things, but ultimately the people behind it doesn't, and all of these people are shilling bastards that you shouldn't pay any attention to whatsoever. Maybe I sound a little bit bitter? No, lol.

You can get a fully functioning e-commerce website for £500. £3,000 is insane. Says who? Says you, random scrappy guy on TikTok. But in the interest of fairness, let's lay out the argument that TikTok has been arguing to me all of this week.

They're arguing now as a web designer, me, and a web design agency, also me, we're not needed anymore because AI, you can just go to it now, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever it is, and just say build me a website. They argue that the results of that are good enough to not need someone like me to design and build you a website. They argue that the models pretty soon are going to be good enough to get rid of an entire industry. In broad strokes, that's the argument. There's elements of truth to that argument.

It has certainly sped things up. AI is a better coder. It knows every coding language that's ever existed. And when you use it to code websites or code apps or systems, it's a bit like that scene in The Matrix where he downloads the whole of kung fu and starts fighting. But at best, AI is like a junior developer.

You ask it to do a thing and it does it verbatim. It doesn't do a good job. You then have to go away and check it and then tweak it and then keep tweaking until you finally get 90% of the way there to the result that you originally wanted. So, the sell, the argument that TikTok is making isn't quite the truth, and I don't believe it ever will be. "Haha, this is absolutely not true anymore.

I'll take your 500-lb test." Of course you would because you're shilling AI products. The reason they're lying to you is because you can't build your own website. It's the same as if you were to go into a field with a tractor in it and somebody said to you, "Go get in the tractor and you can farm this field." The tool is there to farm the field, but you don't have the skills to know how to farm a field. Even if in the tractor there was a farm field button, you would have no idea as to whether it had farmed the field, it had cut all the crops down, or whether or not it had done a good job. And that's where we're at, and I think that's where we'll remain.

If you want to go away and prompt your own website and build your own website, of course you can do it, but if you've got no experience, the 20 years of experience I've been talking about, you have no idea of the results. You have no idea if the contact form is going to be broken, or you have no idea if the SEO is correct. You have no idea if it's emailing random people, or being used to hack other websites. You have no idea about any of this stuff, because you don't know how to build a website in the first place. And show me a corporate multi-million pound company that would ever trust that process.

They wouldn't. There's always been a new technology just around the corner that's going to completely change the way that web design is done. And that's true. It does change web design. AI has completely changed web design.

It's completely changed how we design and build websites. That is 100% true. But it hasn't changed the industry all that much. The industry still exists, and it will, because clients, multi-million pound clients, the kind of people that I work with, want to hire a professional to do a professional job. They don't want to hire a 15-year-old who's watched a thousand TikTok videos to prompt their way to a website.

Are you from the past? Lol. Nobody is paying that sort of money for a website anymore. Yes, I'm from yesterday, when my client paid my 10,000 pound invoice. My job is becoming a little bit weird, though.

I'm spending more time fixing other people's messes. I've had multiple people come to me now who've built their own websites on either ChatGPT or Claude, and said, "Uh my contact form's not working. Can you help me fix the contact form?" And then when I go in there and look at the site, there's a whole whole chain of prompts in there, and whole chain of answers, explaining exactly how to fix the contact form. The problem is, these people who are building these websites who then come to me, have no idea what a contact form is, or the underlying technology of how they work. They have no idea what Postmark is, or get or post requests, or any of these things.

So even though the answers are in plain English being told to them, they have no idea how to interpret those answers technically to go fix it. One portion of my job is fixing these things that other people have built that they should never have built in the first place, which is a weird interest in power. The other thing I'm seeing, which is more genuine, is people using AI to wireframe websites or come up with ideas or get a clearer picture of what they want from a website before they come to somebody like me to pay a lot of money for one. And I think that's a really legitimate way to use AI. You can prompt AI all day long to say, "Look, I'm thinking about designing a new website for my company.

I'm not sure what elements to include. I'm not sure what I want to change. Go analyze my current website and make me a wireframe or even a design for a website, a new website." The result that comes back can then be passed to an agency. And that agency can help you interpret that into a unique and new website that's definitely going to be designed and built properly. I know a lot of this video, especially if you're an AI bro, especially if you're one of those religious zealots, is going to sound like cope or cope, as you might say if you didn't have a Yorkshire accent.

And I've had that comment a lot on some of these TikTok videos that I've produced bashing AI. I don't think it is cope though. I am very comfortable in my career. My business is running really well. We still sell premium websites despite AI.

I've been existing now for two or three years because the biggest thing that these guys don't realize is that AI is just another tool. And the tool in the right hands is the way that the tool gets used properly. We use AI every day of our lives to code websites now, to fix websites, to interact with websites, to diagnose websites, to do everything with websites pretty much. It's our default coding tool now. But the keyword is tool, and we know how to use that tool because we've designed and built websites before that tool existed.

So when people say, "Is it cope?" I don't think it is. "Who the is still paying for a website?" Crying emoji. Well, all of my clients are still paying for websites. All of my friends' clients are still paying for websites. Uh all of the people that I know are charging for SEO are paying for websites, all of the people that I know are hiring copywriters and photographers and videographers, they're all paying for websites.

Basically, any professional business is still paying for a website. Sorry to break it to you. But, I may eat my hat in another 2 years time or 1 year time or 6 months time. I may be proved wrong. Maybe my job as designing and building custom websites for multi-million pound clients goes away tomorrow.

And it may do as I know it today. But, I don't think my job designing and consulting these companies to build websites, whether or not I directly design or build them, will disappear. Because that expertise that I've had and still have and continue to have every day of my life won't be going away. And AI won't give you the whole answer. It gives you just enough to think you've got the right answer.

But, without the knowledge behind that to analyze whether it's done the thing right or wrong, you aren't sure whether you have the right or wrong thing. But, I said, maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe my job will disappear. Maybe it is all cope. But, in the meantime, if you want to continue fixing your website, go watch this video next.

It's the next thing you should look at when it comes to your website.