Imagine it’s 2011. The web is mostly server-rendered PHP templates, maybe a bit of jQuery if you’re feeling fancy, or sometimes no JavaScript at all. Interactivity is limited, everything is a request-response loop, and the idea of complex client-side apps isn’t really mainstream yet. It works, it’s predictable, and honestly… nobody is panicking 😄
Now imagine that into this world, suddenly, we drop modern AI. Not some early experimental models, but something close to what we have today — LLMs, coding agents, tools that generate entire features from prompts. Codex, Claude Code, all that magic. The kind of tools that can scaffold half your app before you even finish your coffee ☕
Quick side note before I continue, because I’m way too excited not to mention this 😄 I’ll be speaking at JSNation 2026, which still feels a bit surreal. It’s one of those conferences where all the big JavaScript minds show up… and apparently also me 😉
Don’t worry though — I won’t bring shame to the DEV community 😅 I’m bringing my talk “Rewrite or Refactor? How to Safely Move Legacy Apps to Modern Frameworks,” which I’ve already tested on stage. If you’re curious, you'll be able to watch it here: https://gitnation.com/badges/jsnation-2026/sylwia_laskowska_154511. And honestly, even if you’re not a frontend dev but you like my articles, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway — it’s basically a “spoken article” 😄
Also, to celebrate, I bought a non-alcoholic beer and somehow woke up feeling like I had a huge hangover. So yes, new achievement unlocked.
So back to the thought experiment. What actually happens next? Do we accelerate into the modern web faster, because suddenly everyone has a superpowered assistant? Or do we get something much less exciting — a world where AI keeps reinforcing what already works and we never quite feel the need to move beyond it?
Because here’s the uncomfortable question: what if AI doesn’t accelerate progress as much as we think… but instead quietly stabilizes it? 👀
AI Is Brilliant — As Long As You Stay on Known Ground
I’m not an AI expert, and I’m not going to pretend I am. I use LLMs daily, I know what RAG is, I understand inference, matrix multiplication, sampling — enough to work with it comfortably. But I never really thought about AI in terms of shaping the direction of technology, not just speeding it up.
That changed when I started working more with WebAssembly and WebGPU. And something became obvious pretty quickly.
LLMs are extremely good at things like Rust, standard frontend work, typical patterns — anything with lots of existing examples. You ask for a simple feature, like downloading an image, and you get clean, idiomatic code almost instantly. It honestly feels like cheating 😄
But the moment you move into newer territory, like WebGPU and WGSL shaders, things start to break down. Mistakes become frequent, assumptions are off, APIs get mixed up. You stop trusting the output and go back to manual coding, debugging everything yourself like it’s 2010 again.
And it’s not because AI is “bad.” It’s because it simply hasn’t seen enough of it. WGSL has only been around since roughly 2021. Compared to decades of web dev patterns, that’s basically nothing.
AI Optimizes for What Exists
This is where the whole thing flips a bit. We like to think AI helps us write better code and make smarter decisions. But in practice, it mostly guides us toward what is most common, most represented, most reinforced by data.
It doesn’t think like a senior engineer. It doesn’t evaluate trade-offs or long-term consequences. It pattern-matches.
That’s why it will often default to React on the frontend — not because it’s always the best choice, but because it’s everywhere. Angular or Vue might be a better fit in some cases, but AI doesn’t “prefer” them. It just hasn’t seen them as much.
If you’re experienced, you catch this and adjust. But if you’re tired, under pressure, or just want to get things done (so… most of us most of the time 😅), you go with what it gives you. It works, it compiles, ship it.
And that’s the subtle shift: AI isn’t just helping you code — it’s quietly influencing how we all code.
From Exploration to Convenience
Before AI, web development was rarely about comfort. It was about pain 😄
PHP templates worked — until they didn’t. We needed interactivity, so we started hacking things with JavaScript. Then jQuery appeared to manage the chaos. Then SPAs happened, because managing state on the client became unavoidable. Frameworks evolved, patterns evolved, everything kept moving forward.
There was always friction. And that friction forced people to think, experiment, and sometimes try things that weren’t yet mainstream.
Now imagine removing most of that friction. You can get a working solution almost instantly, without digging too deep. And when that happens, something subtle shifts. You stop asking “is this the best way?” and start asking “does this already work?”
And once that mindset kicks in, exploration slowly starts to disappear.
Cognitive Miser Meets AI
There’s also a very human factor here. We’re what psychologists call “cognitive misers,” which basically means we avoid unnecessary thinking whenever possible. If there’s an easier path, we take it.
AI is the ultimate easy path — which is exactly why it’s so powerful 😄
But it also creates a feedback loop. AI suggests common solutions, developers implement them, those solutions become even more common, and AI becomes even more confident in suggesting them again.
Breaking out of that loop requires effort. And effort is exactly what we’re trying to avoid when using AI in the first place.
Back to 2011
So let’s go back to that original scenario. You’re a developer in 2011, building a web app. You have access to a powerful AI assistant trained on everything that existed at the time: PHP templates, early JavaScript, server-side rendering patterns.
You ask it how to build a feature, and it gives you a clean, working solution — in PHP. It’s fast, it’s familiar, and it solves your problem.
Would you really push for a completely new paradigm, like client-side apps? Would you experiment with something that doesn’t yet exist, when the current approach already works and is fully supported by your tools?
Or would you just… ship? 😄
If enough people choose to just ship, something interesting happens. Not a dramatic collapse — just a quiet lack of movement.
And suddenly, the future doesn’t get built as quickly as it could have.
The Real Risk
I don’t think AI will replace developers. That’s the obvious discussion, and honestly, the less interesting one.
The more interesting possibility is that AI makes us extremely efficient at continuing in the same direction we’re already going. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s shaped by the past and optimized around it.
And if we’re not careful, we might start optimizing everything — our tools, our workflows, even our decisions — around what already exists, instead of pushing toward what doesn’t yet.
A Different Perspective
On the other hand… when it comes to innovation, things are accelerating like crazy. New ideas are moving faster than ever. What used to take years now happens in months.
But innovation has always been driven by a relatively small group — the ones exploring new tools and pushing boundaries.
The rest of us?
We sit down every day and work with what’s already there. Stable, supported, well-documented. The kind of stack AI understands really well.
So yes — innovation is speeding up. But at the same time, AI might be making it easier than ever for everyone else to stay exactly where they are.
And that’s exactly why I hope I’m wrong.
So now I’m really curious — what do you think?
If AI had existed in 2011, would we have built the modern web faster… or would we still be comfortably sitting in index.php? 😄
If you made it this far, maybe consider giving me a like or even a follow on
LinkedIn 🙂
I’ll admit — I’m definitely not a LinkedIn master 😄 My reach there isn’t amazing (I usually just post links to my articles, often with a delay xD). But I think I might have an idea for some shorter-form content there…
Top comments (8)
First, congratulation for your next stand up: Rewrite of Refactor
I am also like to play with time, and I think your prespective of view is valid. LLM / agents is strong on avarage knowledge which cause a stabilization.
But also improve a creativity because speed up creative thinker process in any kind of topic.
Last: I drink my coffe much fasta than AI can solve any problem.
Exactly! 😄 Rewrite or Refactor does feel a bit like a stand-up sometimes, although there’s definitely plenty of technical depth in there too!
And I totally agree on the creativity part. For me, AI is a huge creativity boost as well, it really speeds up the thinking and experimenting process. But… yeah, there’s a catch. To actually use it that way, you need to bring some creativity yourself first. Otherwise it just reinforces the obvious paths.
And also, Mordor coffee absolutely wins this race ☕😂
Interesting Post. I'm seeing fewer projects that are genuinely solving a problem. In the early days of new tools, people would say "are you crazy, that's impossible" and yet these tools ended up transforming the software industry. Now it feels like we are mostly stacking abstraction on top of abstraction, and fewer people are pushing the table with crazy ideas that could actually change the industry by creating something that makes our life easier.
Btw, I wasn't writing code back in 2011, but I experienced that exact era for fun when I started learning before touching fancy frameworks. That raw friction of figuring out things out from scratch helped me a lot.
Oh yes, this is so underrated.
That whole phase of digging into the fundamentals, syntax, how things actually work under the hood, connecting the dots yourself, it pays off for years. I went through a similar phase at some point in my career, spending a lot of time on exactly that, and I still rely on it today.
It really changes how you see everything later. Frameworks stop feeling like “magic” and start looking like what they actually are, just tools built on top of those same fundamentals.
That’s also why I’ve never really been a fan of any particular framework. For me, they’re just tools. Useful ones, sometimes great ones, but still just tools 🙂
Very interesting point. I once read that the Roman empire could have invented the steam engine and electricity. But manual labor was so cheap that tech progress promised no value.
In 2011, we had more fragmented browser engines compared to 2026, which is why we needed mootools and jQuery in the first place. Visual cross-browser development still isn't the LLM's strongest field right now. I can hardly imagine how they'd cope with it back then, and I guess Flash was also still around. But let's just imagine they did, either we'd be stuck in the millenium mindest or all browsers would support TypeScript natively and Angular, React, and Vue had all converged into a common, AI-written pattern library, and software hype cycles hadn't dared to introduce as many breaking changes. So, honestly, maybe I'd prefer that alternative reality.
This is really interesting, mainly the part about the AI stabilizing things. In other hand for innovation, i do not think we will be have everything we have now if it was the case. We will have different things an less advanced like now.
People will be focused on stabilizing, create pattern than creating SPA. I do not think we will not have it but we will have it more later as the focus has shift because thing because less uncomfortable. As you said, we are cognitive misers so less will have the need to push forward but some will still try it.
This is such a fascinating question and honestly, a little uncomfortable to sit with.
I think you're right to ask. The modern web was built on experimentation, failure, and let's try this and see what breaks. Responsive design wasn't a prompt. React wasn't generated. People struggled, argued, built things that didn't work, and eventually figured out what did.
If AI had been there to optimize everything, would we have ever gotten CSS Grid? Would someone have prompted "make a component system" and stopped at the first working answer? Probably.
The scariest part isn't what AI would have done. It's what we wouldn't have done because AI gave us a good enough answer before we had a chance to be curious.
That said maybe AI would have accelerated things too. Maybe we'd be 10 years ahead. But we'd also have missed the messy, beautiful process of figuring it out ourselves.
What's one web technology you're glad we struggled to invent without AI?
Thanks for this — made me think. 🙌
This is a really interesting angle, especially the idea that AI might stabilize things instead of accelerating them.
What stands out to me is that AI doesn’t just help us build — it shapes what we consider “buildable.” If it’s trained on what already exists, then by default it keeps reinforcing the current path, not necessarily the next one.
So in a 2011 scenario, I honestly think we wouldn’t have rushed into SPAs the way we did. Not because the idea wasn’t valuable, but because the friction that forced that shift would’ve been reduced. And historically, most big shifts in the web came from discomfort, not convenience.
At the same time though, I don’t think exploration disappears — it just becomes more concentrated. The difference is that instead of many developers experimenting out of necessity, you’d have a smaller group pushing boundaries while everyone else optimizes around stable patterns.
So the web probably still evolves, but the distribution of innovation changes. Less chaotic exploration, more centralized breakthroughs.
The real question then becomes: does that make the ecosystem stronger… or just more predictable?