.

link here:

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ashley-frieze_heres-the-ai-fallacy-that-the-junkies-are-activity-7411011732246007808-jHRp?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAlGRrEBiJl3WYxHcYWhKP0pz9RSvtCmRkU

Software Engineers’ value is - roughly speaking - in automating processes - we make machines generate value¹ like tireless robotic hamsters in little virtual wheels.

Ironically the moment that a process can be fully automated it becomes a commodity. If enough competitors can automate it then it’s price becomes dictated by how much it can be sold for, not how much value it generates.

Take web design and development - once a great money spinner, people couldn’t make websites, but everybody needed one. You knew HTML, CSS and (, gosh!) SEO!

Clients booked, websites made, bills paid.

And so we wanted to make more. We wanted to make web development faster, more efficient; we wanted to automate it.

Then squarespace ruined it for all of us ². Web dev as we knew it was dead. ³ They had gone and automated all the work out of it. Exactly what we wanted. Exactly what we craved. Exactly what ended our gravy trains.

It all has to be about AI these days…

Many AI/LLM/GPT-sock-puppet⁴ companies are reaching for very-big-pots-of-gold (VBPOG) in the same manner as SquareSpace very successfully did. Trouble is, they often have no moat. If it’s so easy to build an LLM based app to automate such a thing… then so can I. So can you, too, probably.

@TODO: provide examples.

Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned in how SquareSpace won their war. They were hardly the only company trying to automate web development. Heck there still are drag-n-drop solutions out there - probably even being released today. But they have mindshare (and the marketing budget to maintain it⁵).