People ask us some version of the same question. If AI is building the site, what are we paying you for? It’s a fair question. Below is how AI in web design works on our projects, split into the parts the AI does and the parts we do.
Part of Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
The AI writes the code and checks it
The AI does most of the typing. When we describe a change, it writes the code and shows us the finished page. When we want to compare layouts, it makes several versions in the time one used to take.
After a page changes, it tests how fast the page loads and how easy it is to use for people with poor eyesight or screen readers. It does this with Lighthouse, Google’s free tool. Then it takes screenshots at phone and desktop sizes so we can look at both. On one project the brand’s teal failed the contrast test by one hundredth of a point. That’s the kind of thing a person squinting at a screen tends to miss.
It can read code, too. When nobody had written down how a theme (a site’s design template) stored its settings, the AI read the theme’s own code to work it out. That kind of digging is slow for a person and quick for the AI.
People make the decisions
We decide what gets built. That starts before any code, with a look at your current site and your competitors, and it carries on through every page. Choosing the layouts is our job, and so is deciding what a customer sees first on a phone. When a version is only fine instead of right, we’re the ones who say so.
You talk to us. The AI has never met your customers, and you have.
A person checks the AI’s work, and only a person can put it live. Our deploy tools won’t publish anything until a person types the word “deploy” by hand, and the AI isn’t allowed to type it for us.
And the result is our responsibility. If something breaks, you call a person, and fixing it is our job.
How AI in web design keeps the price down
On a traditional project, most of the paid hours go to typing code and redoing pages after each round of changes. The AI now does most of that. The parts that need judgment take about as long as they always did, but they’re a much smaller share of the bill.
That’s why we can charge well under agency rates for a site that does the same jobs. The calendar doesn’t shrink as much, because waiting on content and decisions doesn’t get any faster.
When it’s more than a website
The same split works on bigger jobs. If your site needs bookings, payments or a members’ area, there’s real software behind it. The AI does the typing there too, and an engineer makes the calls. We build custom software the same way.
If you’re weighing a quote from us or anyone else, ask who makes the decisions and who checks the work before it goes live. Any honest shop should be able to name a person for both.