The AI website illusion isn't new

On the surface, the problem seems new: with the advent of AI, clients see polished presentations of complex websites, with claims that they were produced in hours using AI. I want to push back on that. The problem is not new, and it existed long before AI.

The pain is real, but to me it is an old one. Clients expected months of work for pennies long before AI. It was particularly bad in the early internet days, when clients assumed that things on the internet cost little or nothing. They would ask us to produce equivalents of Vimeo or Shopify with no grasp of the budget that takes. I think that's because online experiences feel immediate, and the production effort behind them is not visible to non-specialists. Hype has little to do with it. Serious clients are the ones who know what production work actually is.

So here is my question to the reader: do the Instagram Reels showing award-winning websites change anything that decades of clients underpricing invisible work hadn't already changed?

Yours, unindexed,
Zhenia