Adding onto the middle two bullets (training on freelance work and reducing freelance jobs), existing freelancers already steal everything that isn’t available as a template. That’s how templates get made and moved from platform to platform. The history of web dev is all about someone doing something cool on their website and then someone else copying it and so on. Squarespace templates are just ripoffs of Wordpress templates which are just ripoffs of agency Wordpress work or agency/solo websites. There’s no copyright to that design already.
Also the market is fucking predatory for the layman. This is a net good in terms of democratizing the internet. Instead of forcing me to go to some Meta site where they control the dialogue, I can go to your site. Before small businesses couldn’t really afford the cost or maintenance for a site or just didn’t know where to start. A lot of freelance WP or Drupal or Magento stuff was so poorly secured that businesses got fucked by trusting the kid of the secretary who said they could do it for 10x than the firm quoted and the company couldn’t even figure out UpWork code exchanges. More importantly, there’s nothing stopping the freelancer from just doing this behind the scenes so you can’t really complain about lost jobs.
Code generation is a net win for everyone. If these same people aren’t shitting on Copilot or even privately trained Tabnine they have no place in this discussion.
Adding onto the middle two bullets (training on freelance work and reducing freelance jobs), existing freelancers already steal everything that isn’t available as a template. That’s how templates get made and moved from platform to platform. The history of web dev is all about someone doing something cool on their website and then someone else copying it and so on. Squarespace templates are just ripoffs of Wordpress templates which are just ripoffs of agency Wordpress work or agency/solo websites. There’s no copyright to that design already.
Also the market is fucking predatory for the layman. This is a net good in terms of democratizing the internet. Instead of forcing me to go to some Meta site where they control the dialogue, I can go to your site. Before small businesses couldn’t really afford the cost or maintenance for a site or just didn’t know where to start. A lot of freelance WP or Drupal or Magento stuff was so poorly secured that businesses got fucked by trusting the kid of the secretary who said they could do it for 10x than the firm quoted and the company couldn’t even figure out UpWork code exchanges. More importantly, there’s nothing stopping the freelancer from just doing this behind the scenes so you can’t really complain about lost jobs.
Code generation is a net win for everyone. If these same people aren’t shitting on Copilot or even privately trained Tabnine they have no place in this discussion.