Web Dev Isn’t Dying - It’s Just Rebranding Again
Every few years, web development “dies.”
Someone writes a Medium article. LinkedIn eats it up. Recruiters still DM you about a job that needs “React + 5 years experience (urgent).”
This time the killers are AI and no-code tools. Before that, it was WordPress. Before that, it was Wix. And way back in the ancient times…
Dreamweaver.
Yes. That Dreamweaver.
A Short Eulogy for Dreamweaver
There was a time when Dreamweaver was the tool.
Drag, drop, WYSIWYG, publish.
People genuinely believed this was the future of web dev.
And for a while?
It worked.
Then real requirements showed up:
“Can we customize this?”
“Why does it break on mobile?”
“Why is the code… like that?”
Dreamweaver didn’t die because devs hated it.
It died because the web grew up.
But honestly? I’m grateful for it.
My older brother installed it on our home PC running on a Pentium 4 (I cry looking at my Ryzen 9 today) alongside Photoshop when it still had the Slice Tool (you know, design an image like a website and cut everything up). I used it on Friendster, of all places.
Damn, I feel old.
No-Code Is the New Dreamweaver (Don’t Panic)
No-code tools today feel very… Dreamweaver-coded-in-React:
“Build without developers!”
“Launch in days!”
“Scale instantly!”
And just like before, they’re not useless.
They’re actually great for:
landing pages
internal dashboards
MVPs that exist mostly for investor decks
But the moment someone asks:
“Can we tweak this logic just a bit?”
Congratulations 🎉
You’re back to needing a developer.
No-code doesn’t kill web dev.
It absorbs the easy parts so devs can deal with the messier ones.
AI Is Powerful - and Also Very Confidently Wrong
AI can:
scaffold apps
write boilerplate
refactor like it’s caffeinated
But it can also:
hallucinate APIs
ignore edge cases
ship code that passes review but fails reality
AI is not a senior dev.
It’s more like:
that intern who learned fast, works 24/7,
and never admits when they’re unsure.
Useful? Absolutely.
Replace you? Only if your job was just typing.
Just like Philippine Politics 🇵🇭
If web dev were really dying, this would be the only country where it survives.
Why?
Because we love:
band-aid solutions
“pwede na yan”
systems built on top of systems built on top of Excel
Very on-brand.
We don’t decommission systems.
We elect them again with a new logo.
Same thing in tech:
legacy code doesn’t disappear
it just gets wrapped in a newer framework and rebranded as “v2”
AI won’t clean that up.
No-code definitely won’t.
Someone still has to understand the mess.
The Job Didn’t Disappear - The Bar Just Moved
Before, web dev was:
“Can you build a website?”
Now it’s:
Can you reason about trade-offs?
Can you debug code you didn’t write (and don’t like)?
Can you explain why something shouldn’t be built?
The work shifted from:
writing code
to:
deciding what code should exist at all
That part is still very human.