Thank god one builder is enough again…
In today’s tech landscape, entire disciplines exist just to manage the sheer bloat of oversized teams. Anyone unlucky enough to have held the role of ‘Scrum Master’ before knows the horror of a job where the core function is to herd developers through layers and layers of administrative hurdles, meetings, and formalities ending in reports and graphs that ultimately nobody really looks at.
Why is this a thing? Because what used to be a simple, focused build has blown out into multiple frontend teams, backend teams, UX designers, UI designers, copywriters, content strategists, and a thick, suffocating layer of process on top of the actual work. If you’re in this field, then you know it’s perfectly commonplace for a single landing page build with minimal functionality to drag on for a year or more.
It wasn’t always like this.
In the 1990’s, when companies needed a website, they only hired one person – a webmaster. One person designed, coded, and managed the whole thing – often times on top of their regular admin or IT roles. Call me old fashioned, but I’m still wondering how the heck we got to a point where a six-figure budget and a multi-million-dollar agency with 200+ staffers are norms when it comes to shipping sites.
In the good ol’ days, the webmaster was that full-service end-to-end digital product team. They mapped the page layouts, user flows, and navigation, and then hand-coded everything in raw HTML (later adding CSS, JavaScript, even Flash) to bring a site to life. On top of that, they’d design logos or edit graphics when needed.
They also set up and maintained the web server, pushed deployments through FTP, and kept the content fresh by adding, updating, and formatting pages. Webmasters handled early SEO too, by tracking hit counters, submitting sites to search engines, and implementing clever techniques to up search rankings.
And they even doubled as customer support. Remember those “Contact the Webmaster” links at the bottom of old sites? That was the catch-all inbox for broken links, typos, and cross-browser quirks, and the webmaster was the only one who knew how to answer to them.
That role is a lost part of history. Search for “webmaster” jobs today and if you find the antiquated title at all, you’ll see see it in the form of caretakers of legacy systems – usually government or education who are still maintaining sprawling sites stuck on old frameworks – or you’ll find it’s branched off into more content or devops specific roles. All of these are only slices of what the webmaster used to be.
Web 2.0 brought dynamic, database-driven sites with enhanced interactivity and more moving parts, and that leap in complexity also expanded and fragmented the work. Not to mention that tech companies became stuffed with venture capital, so they could afford to carve jobs into silos. Specialization became a way to show legitimacy. Suddenly, you “needed” backend engineers for databases and servers, frontend engineers for rich interfaces, UX designers to map flows, sysadmins for scaling uptime, QA testers to catch bugs, and project managers to herd it all. It’s only gotten bigger and more bloated as time has gone by. And the true generalist webmaster – the one who could conceive, design, build, and ship a whole platform end-to-end – was killed off by Web 2.0.
But guess what? We’re back, baby! With today’s vibe coding and AI-assisted dev tools, much of that “necessary” specialization could be collapsing again. Because a single person can now spin up a full-feature MVP in hours.
Of course, not everyone in the industry is rushing to embrace this concept. Apart from general skepticism around AI tools, there is the element of job security – if one person can ship what used to take a team of twenty, what happens to the other nineteen people? For many, vibe coding feels like another way for corporations to slash payrolls and scale profits. That fear is justified, too. Since gen AI tools popularized, we’ve been knee-deep in the biggest surge of tech layoffs since the dotcom bubble – whether causation or correlation, this is still our current reality.
Corporations may have dollar signs in their eyes for AI tools, but not everything in the world has to be for them. The rise of AI tools also means that small teams and underfunded orgs can finally build what they’ve been priced out of. The same cost-cutting tools that makes Big Tech salivate can also put real power back in the hands of the people who’ve been locked out of innovation.
AI tools are actually handing us something that Big Tech, in spite of their profit-rearing measures, has completely lost sight of: efficiency without bloat. That’s the rebellion. We can wield vibe-coding to help individuals, grassroots orgs, and small teams finally compete with institutions that waste millions just to stuff their own pockets, and maybe even render their services useless.
And thank the fucking lord. After years of climbing through layers of administrative fluff to get products shipped, we can finally do the work in two weeks that everyone else drags out for two years.