AI is a technology that has amazing capabilities, and it is one of the best technologies for the future. It is helping change the world and bringing productivity enhancements across industries with its exceptional use cases.
Today, every developer likes to use AI tools so that they can deliver more solutions to their clients in a shorter time. However, this also raises a serious concern about AI usage. Can AI replace web developers entirely? As we advance through this article, we will explore the role of AI, the advantages and limitations of this technology, and how developers can become future-ready with AI.
So, let’s get started by understanding the current role of AI in the web development domain.
Current Role of AI in Web Development
Web development is often considered an area where AI can make a significant impact. But developers who build awesome web apps and solutions for enterprise usage know that it is not easy for any AI model to build such web apps. Due to this, AI is not considered a threat, but a helper. Below are some key roles that AI plays in today’s web development projects.
Website Builders
Today, everyone wants a website that can be built faster, and AI-powered website builders help in achieving that goal. Tools like Wix ADI help in creating design layouts and images for your websites, and also simplify the design process for everyone.
When working with such tools, you don't need coding skills, but an eye for design and understanding of integrations between web pages to build simple websites. Moreover, such website builders often provide design suggestions at each step so that you can continuously enhance your website and publish the best version.
Code Generation and Automation Tools
Code generation is one of the biggest advances in AI technology and this has increased the usage of AI across the world. Smart AI tools can help with code generation based on clear prompts and help speed up the development process. A significant 82% of developers actively using automation tools primarily rely on them to generate, refine, and accelerate coding workflows.
Such code generation and automation tools reduce repetitive work for web developers and help them focus on the things that matter for the business. Tools like Github CoPilot, ChatGPT, and Tabnine help with well-crafted and context-aware code suggestions in the IDE to enhance developer productivity, enforce language best practices, and deliver better quality code.
AI-powered UI/UX Design
UI/UX design is a lengthy and creative process involving multiple iterations to create stunning designs for your websites. While no AI model can match the human touch and creativity levels, it can surely assist designers and help create new designs faster.
AI-powered UI/UX design tools like Figma AI and Adobe Sensei provide design ideas on the go so designers can experiment with multiple designs without spending lots of time thinking of new ideas. Moreover, such tools help in finding optimal layouts for the webpages, and even follow accessible design standards to make your webpages accessible from the start.
These tools can surely speed up the design process, but they cannot completely eliminate UI/UX designers due to their deeper understanding of branding, user experience, and many other domains.
AI-powered Testing
Writing test cases for your code and testing it for finding bugs is an important task in each web development project, but it is often considered a tedious task. Sometimes, developers or test engineers can miss certain edge cases that are hard to come by but can cause significant issues to users if they happen.
With AI-powered testing tools, you can count on AI models to help you find critical edge cases and enhance your app’s coverage so that you aren’t releasing a website with bugs. You can also simulate user testing through AI models to verify whether your website makes sense and helps users, or whether it is providing a bad user experience.
Content and SEO
Every website needs content that is relevant and provides useful information to visitors about the site. The content should also help you rank higher in search results and beat competitors by driving more traffic to your website.
While all these things are trivial and require deeper expertise, AI tools like Clearscope and Jasper AI can help you find the right keywords that are trending for your industry and build content around those keywords to rank higher in search results.
AI models can understand search engine algorithms better, so they suggest content revisions for your websites that help you stand out and grow your business.
As AI models play different roles in today’s web development projects, you should also know the advantages that they bring. So, let’s explore the advantages of AI use in web development.
Advantages of AI in Web Development
Strategic adoption of intelligent technologies is reshaping how digital experiences are built, enabling greater speed, consistency, and adaptability across modern web development processes.
Faster Development Time
With AI tools, the development time becomes much faster, and your teams can deliver more projects in a shorter time span. They reduce manual tasks and improve the efficiency of developers, so they can divert their focus on solving complex business problems without worrying about simpler implementations.
Accessibility Improvements
AI tools also help in improving the accessibility of websites so they can be accessed across different devices and platforms. Moreover, accessibility improvements focus on making the website easy to access for people with some sort of challenge.
These improvements include generating alt text for all images on the page, analyzing and fixing color contrasts so pages are easier to read, and also making the elements on the webpage compatible with screen reader devices.
Cost Effective
AI models help in setting up automation for repetitive tasks, so that your team members can focus on higher-value tasks. The initial setup and training of models may cost significantly, but the benefits come in the long term as they reduce the need for long testing cycles, time to build apps, and even SEO-tuning for website content.
Limitations of AI Tools
AI models and tools are not at their best performance levels till now, and they are still developing. Due to this, there are multiple limitations that make it impossible for AI to replace web developers completely. So, let’s look at some limitations of such models.
Lack of Creativity
AI tools are created by humans, and they cannot match the creativity levels of humans who are naturally creative. Such models cannot create bespoke UI/UX designs that can completely replace developers and designers.
Rather, they can only recycle and perform different combinations of an existing creative design created by humans. This lack of creativity and thinking skills strengthens the claim that they are not here to replace web developers and designers.
Limited Problem-solving Capacity
AI tools that help in debugging and code generation often have limited problem-solving capacity, which becomes a problem quickly when it comes to enterprise setups. These models can help in debugging and solving problems within a defined constraint and codebase, but they fail when the codebase becomes large and spreads across different moving objects.
Moreover, they can only work well with technologies that they have already been trained on. If your teams start using new technology that isn’t known by any AI model, the models can become useless, and they will often derail your team from their objective.
Ethical Concerns
Ethical concerns have always been around AI models, and these concerns are for code security, and bias which can quickly go wrong, and expose your apps to severe cybersecurity issues too.
Moreover, publicly accessible models can remember the code you gave it for some issues, and also share it with other users which is a big privacy concern for companies.
Human Dependency
AI tools require humans to run, and they are always dependent on the correct input to generate the required output. Without inputs and prompts, AI models may not be able to help your teams, and even then, they can generate buggy code.
Developers need to constantly review, test, and update AI-generated code so it can work as expected in the business context. Such human dependency ensures that web developers are always required, and they cannot be completely replaced.
How can developers adopt AI and become future-ready?
Even though there are many limitations to AI models, they are still good to use for some tasks, and definitely make development faster. If you are a web developer, below are some ways you can adopt AI and become future-ready.
Learn AI tools
Learning AI tools is the first thing that you should do as a web developer. Think of AI tools as helpers that can power up your work and help you finish work tasks much faster.
Tools like GitHub or Copilot can suggest code and help you write better code for every project without thinking too much about basic things. Moreover, you can also use ChatGPT and other chatbots to understand technologies or business processes, so you can model them in your code.
Understand AI/ML
Understanding AI/ML is a crucial task for a web developer. By doing so, you can understand that these models aren’t going to replace you, but they are here to help you. You should try understanding different types of AI models, how they work, what data they are trained on, and other such things at a higher level.
By understanding AI/ML, you will also be able to find the right models for your tasks each time, and this will speed up your development efforts.
Become Cross-functional
Many developers who fear that AI can replace them are not cross-functional, and there is always a demand for cross-functional web developers. To become a cross-functional developer, you should be able to work with APIs, and UI/UX tasks, deploy your apps through DevOps tools, and even test them thoroughly.
Such cross-functional web developers are always in demand as they can achieve a lot more than a normal web developer who can just work on a single thing.
Conclusion
Coming to an end, AI tools are great helpers for kickstarting projects, writing documentation, and experimenting with colors or design layouts, but they cannot completely replace web developers. As the web development domain expands, there will always be things that AI can't do, and developers with AI tools will be in high demand.