I am building a website, for work. It feels like a radical act these days. I am not using an LLM, I am coding with my own hands, wading through documentation, tinkering, reverse engineering, console logging my way to understanding. Learning new skills, refusing to hand them off to an unthinking machine.

Maybe this would be easier with an LLM. But it would be less satisfying, like a sugary snack devoured in haste to stave off hunger. A chatbot could write this code, after extensive prompting, after I’ve spent time thinking how exactly to describe the problem in natural language in order to get an approximation of what I really want. I see myself sighing in frustration when I get back something that’s almost, but not quite, what I’m actually aiming for, that I still have to pick apart and refine, but that’s not mine.

A fundamental lesson of programming is that a computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, no more and no less. Sure, it’s frustrating at times, when your terminal is full of screaming error messages and you can’t for the life of you see where you’ve gone wrong. But you know the answer to the problem is within you somewhere. Sometimes it takes hours. But the high when you finally squash that bug is the reward for your patience and diligence. You’re also rewarded with greater understanding of the problem and solution, knowledge that you’ll carry with you. The feeling of becoming just a little bit better than you were a few hours ago.

An LLM breaks this contract through its non-determinism: for any given input, you’ll get a different output each time. Ask an agent for the same website on ten occasions and each time you’ll get a different one. Another roll of the dice. Certainty is no longer a surety. The answer is no longer within you, but hidden, obscured, obfuscated.

Building a website feels old-fashioned these days. How many more websites do I have left in me before the old fire flickers and dies? Is snuffed out. Before making websites is no longer a viable way to earn a living? The web will change drastically within my lifetime, maybe someday soon, indeed it already has. Maybe it really will fizzle out, a graveyard haunted only by bots and crawlers. But I have a hunch that there will be a long tail. Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads. Making fun websites, helpful websites, pointless websites (the best kind) that serve no purpose other than to manifest someone’s spark of creativity. Ignored by the lumbering giants that have gorged themselves into a stupor, keeping low under the radar of the hungry LLM crawlers eager to voraciously gobble up the last remaining crumbs of the free web. For those last few, it was never about the size of the audience, it was always about the community. And maybe there will be a resurgence, as more people eschew the algorithms, remember the joy of coding, of craft. From the charred remains, green shoots. New life. Maybe we’ll wake up to find little websites everywhere.