Personal Software | Lee Robinson
In the future, everyone can cook.
leerob.com173 posts tagged with “ai”
leerob.com
Chickens to Chatbots: Web Design’s Next Evolution
In the early 2000s to the mid-oughts, every designer I knew wanted to be featured on the FWA, a showcase for cutting-edge web design. While many of the earlier sites were Flash-based, it’s also where I discovered the first uses of parallax, Paper.js, and Three.js. Back then, websites were meant to be explored and their interfaces discovered.
A grid of winners from The FWA in 2009. Source: Rob Ford.
One of my favorite sites of that era was Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, where users could type free text into a chat box to command a man dressed in a chicken suit. In a full circle moment that perfectly captures where we are today, we now type commands into chat boxes to tell AI what to do.
I love this essay from Baldur Bjarnason, maybe because his stream of consciousness style is so similar to my own. He compares the rapidly changing economics of web and software development to the film, TV, and publishing industries.
Before we get to web dev, let’s look at the film industry, as disrupted by streaming.
Like, Crazy Rich Asians made a ton of money in 2018. Old Hollywood would have churned out at least two sequels by now and it would have inspired at least a couple of imitator films. But if they ever do a sequel it’s now going to be at least seven or even eight years after the fact. That means that, in terms of the cultural zeitgeist, they are effectively starting from scratch and the movie is unlikely to succeed.
He’s not wrong.
Every Predator movie after the first has underperformed, yet they keep making more of them. Completed movies are shelved for tax credits. Entire shows are disappeared [from] streamers and not made available anywhere to save money on residuals, which does not make any sense because the economics of Blu-Ray are still quite good even with lower overall sales and distribution than DVD. If you have a completed series or movie, with existing 4K masters, then you’re unlikely to lose money on a Blu-Ray.
I’ll quibble with him here. Shows and movies disappear from streamers because there’s a finite pot of money from subscriber revenue. So removing content will save them money. Blu-Ray is more sustainable because it’s an additional purchase.
OK, let’s get back to web dev.
He points out that similar to the film and other creative industries, developers fill their spare time with passion projects. But their day jobs are with tech companies and essentially subsidize their side projects.
And now, both the creative industries proper and tech companies have decided that, no, they probably don’t need that many of the “grunts” on the ground doing the actual work. They can use “AI” at a much lower cost because the output of the “AI” is not that much worse than the incredibly shitty degraded products they’ve been destroying their industries with over the past decade or so.
Bjarnason ends with seven suggestions for those in the industry. I’ll just quote one:
Don’t get tied to a single platform for distribution or promotion. Every use of a silo should push those interested to a venue you control such as a newsletter or website.
In other words, whatever you do, own your audience. Don’t farm that out to a platform like X/Twitter, Threads, or TikTok.
Of course, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between what’s happening in the development and software engineering industries to what’s happening in design.
The web is a creative industry and is facing the same decline and shattered economics as film, TV, or publishing
Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
baldurbjarnason.com
Design’s Purpose Remains Constant
Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, in their annual The State of UX report:
Despite all the transformations we’re seeing, one thing we know for sure: Design (the craft, the discipline, the science) is not going anywhere. While Design only became a more official profession in the 19th century, the study of how craft can be applied to improve business dates back to the early 1800s. Since then, only one thing has remained constant: how Design is done is completely different decade after decade. The change we’re discussing here is not a revolution, just an evolution. It’s simply a change in how many roles will be needed and what they will entail. “Digital systems, not people, will do much of the craft of (screen-level) interaction design.”
Scary words for the UX design profession as it stares down the coming onslaught of AI. Our industry isn’t the first one to face this—copywriters, illustrators, and stock photographers have already been facing the disruption of their respective crafts. All of these creatives have had to pivot quickly. And so will we.
How I Built and Launched an AI-Powered App
I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…
Birth of an Idea
About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.
Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.
Re-Platforming with a Lot of Help From AI
I decided to re-platform my personal website, moving it from WordPress to React. It was spurred by a curiosity to learn a more modern tech stack like React and the drama in the WordPress community that erupted last month. While I doubt WordPress is going away anytime soon, I do think this rift opens the door for designers, developers, and clients to consider alternatives.
First off, I’m not a developer by any means. I’m a designer and understand technical things well, but I can’t code. When I was young, I wrote programs in BASIC and HyperCard. In the early days of content management systems, I built a version of my personal site using ExpressionEngine. I was always able to tweak CSS to style themes in WordPress. When Elementor came on the scene, I could finally build WP sites from scratch. Eventually, I graduated to other page builders like Oxygen and Bricks.
So, rebuilding my site in React wouldn’t be easy. I went through the React foundations tutorial by Next.js and their beginner full-stack course. But honestly, I just followed the steps and copied the code, barely understanding what was being done and not remembering any syntax. Then I stumbled upon Cursor, and a whole new world opened up.
