AI slop and the illusion of cheap websites

The more popular AI becomes for programming, the more completely AI-generated code you see everywhere. And it’s starting to be quite a problem.

A certain bad habit has spread around here. There are actually “programmers” today who won’t write a single line of code without artificial intelligence. And I’m really not exaggerating. They are capable of sitting in front of an editor and just waiting for what the AI spits out, without having a clue how it actually works under the hood.

I now quite often come across various offers like creating a website for a “great price”. For an unknowledgeable client, it sounds like a super deal. But upon inspecting such a project, it’s immediately obvious what happened. That person didn’t program the website. They generated the whole thing from top to bottom using AI.

What is the main problem?

These websites simply aren’t reliable. Relying on AI to generate a high-quality production application from scratch is naive.

• Loss of control: When something breaks on such a website (and sooner or later, something will break), the person who “created” it is completely lost. They can’t fix it because they never actually wrote the code and don’t understand it at all.

• Architecture: AI tends to write code that might visually solve the current task, but often absolutely ignores the context of the entire project. This results in crazy spaghetti code full of redundancies that cannot be further maintained or expanded.

• Security and performance: AI will happily generate a nice-looking component for you, but from an optimization or security perspective, it’s a complete disaster. Leaky forms, missing validation, or inefficient database queries are the order of the day in these projects.

Initially, the client feels they have saved money. They paid a fraction of the usual price, the website runs, and at first glance, it looks presentable. But the hard reality check comes the moment a new feature needs to be added, or god forbid, the API of a third-party service changes. At that moment, it becomes clear that the entire project is just a house of cards. The developer tries to run it through a prompt again, the AI gets tangled up in the existing code, and a fix that would take an experienced programmer an hour suddenly takes days. Often, there is no choice but to delete the whole thing and write it all over again.

Moreover, it’s also a bit of a trap for junior developers. Instead of learning the basics and understanding how things work under the surface, they rely on a magic box to write it for them. But AI won’t teach you real debugging and how to solve complex architectural problems.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is a great tool for boilerplate code or as an assistant when you get stuck. I use similar tools myself sometimes to save time on routine work. But it’s still just a tool.

If you don’t know how to program without AI, you don’t know how to program at all. And selling people a 100% generated website is just wrong. Programming isn’t just about making it “look okay,” but mainly about making sense on the inside as well.