Background
- The "AI" in question is generative AI for writing code (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor), not machine learning in general. The author is pushing back on the growing assumption that all professional web development now requires AI assistance.
- This is a minority, contrarian take within current tech discourse. Since late 2022, AI coding tools have been heavily promoted by big tech (Microsoft, Google, OpenAI) and adopted widely in the industry, to the point where developers who don't use them sometimes feel pressure to justify themselves.
- The author, Álvaro Prado, is a freelance web developer and designer. His stance reflects a broader debate in software engineering: whether AI tools meaningfully improve productivity and code quality, or whether they create a reliance that erodes deep understanding and craftsmanship.
- The piece resonates with a longer tradition in tech of "doing things the hard way" — valuing understanding your tools deeply rather than outsourcing work to black boxes.