The quality shop

As a boy I was a freelancer for many years. I built and sold websites. I did it like a craftsman: I designed the layout with Macromedia Fireworks, refined it with lines, shadows, and reflections, and then manually converted it to HTML¹. Then I used my own CMS, built from scratch with my own PHP framework, to make it dynamic.

My work was reasonably priced, and it took me a long time to complete. My customers were satisfied. The quality of the product, even though we were talking about the early 2010s, was evident.

Over time, I met a small web agency that, more or less, sold the same product as me. They built it with Microsoft FrontPage starting from existing templates. They had no technical skills whatsoever. The work didn’t go through any design, coding, or PHP engine development process (sometimes I did it for them). The sites were mostly static; they updated them manually by uploading new pages via FTP. It was already “slop” for all intents and purposes.

To build a website this way, they took at least a fifth of the time it took me. The price was the same. The quality was extremely poor, but no client had ever noticed.

How did it end? I started collaborating closely with the agency because I worked more, producing more, on the low-end product they produced instead of creating my own from scratch.

I don’t want to be melodramatic, but it was clear: quality pays, but only when there’s no other option. If quality can be eroded to move faster and produce more economically, those willing to spend will—almost always—choose the latter option.

Today, over twenty years later, there are LLMs. Software can be produced much faster. The quality of the code? Well, it’s often mediocre without any human intervention. But the seller takes a tenth of the time to produce it. And the customer doesn’t notice the difference, especially if they pay less.

I see myself drawing a gray vector line and then a black one, trying to simulate a shadow under a menu bar. And I imagine my former colleague pressing a button and getting a similar but not identical effect, on one of the worst software programs ever. Who will notice anyway?

Commercially, he had won. Commercially, today, those who can get AI to support them in producing their own processes will win. It’s the law of the market. And unfortunately, the market rarely rewards quality.

The good products will remain on display, priced dearly, in a shop in a place kissed by the sea and frequented only in the summer.