AI and deskilling

I’ve been thinking a lot about deskilling lately. I was having a conversation the other day about how not many younger front-end developers don’t know much about the fundamentals of HTML, weird characters, accessibility, and just the basics of web typography. This skill is mostly gone with designers picking up some of the crumbs.

Then I read The deskilling of web dev and found myself nodding along.

So many good points:

I learned how the CSS Grid works over a decade ago. Even if I hadn’t kept up with CSS, everything I learned back then still works today. I could use the basic techniques of the CSS Grid as it existed in 2014 and that code would work unchanged today.

The recommended semantics for HTML have changed, but the basic principle of list or table markup is the same as it was over twenty-five years ago, when I first began. If twenty-something Baldur was cast forward in time to the year 2024 and asked to put together an HTML table that rendered in a modern browser, he’d probably have a harder time figuring out the modern browser UI than with the coding task itself.

But the React skills I have are all out of date and obsolete. I would effectively have to start from scratch even if I wanted to get back into React work. Everything React has changed in ways that are fundamentally incompatible.

And the real gut punch:

But instead we’re all-in on deskilling the industry. Not content with removing CSS and HTML almost entirely from the job market, we’re now shifting towards the model where devs are instead “AI” wranglers. The web dev of the future will be an underpaid generalist who pokes at chatbot output until it runs without error, pokes at a copilot until it generates tests that pass with some coverage, and ships code that nobody understand and can’t be fixed if something goes wrong.

If you think companies are going to pay “AI” wranglers senior-level pay in the long term, or that they’re going to pay for the time it takes to rewrite or properly comprehend the code being generated, then you’re missing the point of why employers are adopting the technology.

The point is to pay fewer of us less: replace senior coders with junior, specialists with generalists, and the trained with untrained.

This is equally true of what’s happening in UX. Doing good, high quality information architecture work takes time and expertise and produces the sorts of results that you just can’t get from an AI wrangler. Fewer companies are willing to pay for the difference.