Imagine it’s 2011. The web is mostly server-rendered PHP templates, maybe a bit of jQuery if you’re feeling fancy, or sometimes no JavaScript at all. Interactivity is limited, everything is a request-response loop, and the idea of complex client-side apps isn’t really mainstream yet. It works, it’s predictable, and honestly… nobody is panicking 😄
Now imagine that into this world, suddenly, we drop modern AI. Not some early experimental models, but something close to what we have today — LLMs, coding agents, tools that generate entire features from prompts. Codex, Claude Code, all that magic. The kind of tools that can scaffold half your app before you even finish your coffee ☕
Quick side note before I continue, because I’m way too excited not to mention this 😄 I’ll be speaking at JSNation 2026, which still feels a bit surreal. It’s one of those conferences where all the big JavaScript minds show up… and apparently also me 😉
Don’t worry though — I won’t bring shame to the DEV community 😅 I’m bringing my talk “Rewrite or Refactor? How to Safely Move Legacy Apps to Modern Frameworks,” which I’ve already tested on stage. If you’re curious, you'll be able to watch it here: https://gitnation.com/badges/jsnation-2026/sylwia_laskowska_154511. And honestly, even if you’re not a frontend dev but you like my articles, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway — it’s basically a “spoken article” 😄
Also, to celebrate, I bought a non-alcoholic beer and somehow woke up feeling like I had a huge hangover. So yes, new achievement unlocked.
So back to the thought experiment. What actually happens next? Do we accelerate into the modern web faster, because suddenly everyone has a superpowered assistant? Or do we get something much less exciting — a world where AI keeps reinforcing what already works and we never quite feel the need to move beyond it?
Because here’s the uncomfortable question: what if AI doesn’t accelerate progress as much as we think… but instead quietly stabilizes it? 👀
AI Is Brilliant — As Long As You Stay on Known Ground
I’m not an AI expert, and I’m not going to pretend I am. I use LLMs daily, I know what RAG is, I understand inference, matrix multiplication, sampling — enough to work with it comfortably. But I never really thought about AI in terms of shaping the direction of technology, not just speeding it up.
That changed when I started working more with WebAssembly and WebGPU. And something became obvious pretty quickly.
LLMs are extremely good at things like Rust, standard frontend work, typical patterns — anything with lots of existing examples. You ask for a simple feature, like downloading an image, and you get clean, idiomatic code almost instantly. It honestly feels like cheating 😄
But the moment you move into newer territory, like WebGPU and WGSL shaders, things start to break down. Mistakes become frequent, assumptions are off, APIs get mixed up. You stop trusting the output and go back to manual coding, debugging everything yourself like it’s 2010 again.
And it’s not because AI is “bad.” It’s because it simply hasn’t seen enough of it. WGSL has only been around since roughly 2021. Compared to decades of web dev patterns, that’s basically nothing.
AI Optimizes for What Exists
This is where the whole thing flips a bit. We like to think AI helps us write better code and make smarter decisions. But in practice, it mostly guides us toward what is most common, most represented, most reinforced by data.
It doesn’t think like a senior engineer. It doesn’t evaluate trade-offs or long-term consequences. It pattern-matches.
That’s why it will often default to React on the frontend — not because it’s always the best choice, but because it’s everywhere. Angular or Vue might be a better fit in some cases, but AI doesn’t “prefer” them. It just hasn’t seen them as much.
If you’re experienced, you catch this and adjust. But if you’re tired, under pressure, or just want to get things done (so… most of us most of the time 😅), you go with what it gives you. It works, it compiles, ship it.
And that’s the subtle shift: AI isn’t just helping you code — it’s quietly influencing how we all code.
From Exploration to Convenience
Before AI, web development was rarely about comfort. It was about pain 😄
PHP templates worked — until they didn’t. We needed interactivity, so we started hacking things with JavaScript. Then jQuery appeared to manage the chaos. Then SPAs happened, because managing state on the client became unavoidable. Frameworks evolved, patterns evolved, everything kept moving forward.
There was always friction. And that friction forced people to think, experiment, and sometimes try things that weren’t yet mainstream.
Now imagine removing most of that friction. You can get a working solution almost instantly, without digging too deep. And when that happens, something subtle shifts. You stop asking “is this the best way?” and start asking “does this already work?”
And once that mindset kicks in, exploration slowly starts to disappear.
Cognitive Miser Meets AI
There’s also a very human factor here. We’re what psychologists call “cognitive misers,” which basically means we avoid unnecessary thinking whenever possible. If there’s an easier path, we take it.
AI is the ultimate easy path — which is exactly why it’s so powerful 😄
But it also creates a feedback loop. AI suggests common solutions, developers implement them, those solutions become even more common, and AI becomes even more confident in suggesting them again.
Breaking out of that loop requires effort. And effort is exactly what we’re trying to avoid when using AI in the first place.
Back to 2011
So let’s go back to that original scenario. You’re a developer in 2011, building a web app. You have access to a powerful AI assistant trained on everything that existed at the time: PHP templates, early JavaScript, server-side rendering patterns.
You ask it how to build a feature, and it gives you a clean, working solution — in PHP. It’s fast, it’s familiar, and it solves your problem.
Would you really push for a completely new paradigm, like client-side apps? Would you experiment with something that doesn’t yet exist, when the current approach already works and is fully supported by your tools?
Or would you just… ship? 😄
If enough people choose to just ship, something interesting happens. Not a dramatic collapse — just a quiet lack of movement.
And suddenly, the future doesn’t get built as quickly as it could have.
The Real Risk
I don’t think AI will replace developers. That’s the obvious discussion, and honestly, the less interesting one.
The more interesting possibility is that AI makes us extremely efficient at continuing in the same direction we’re already going. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s shaped by the past and optimized around it.
And if we’re not careful, we might start optimizing everything — our tools, our workflows, even our decisions — around what already exists, instead of pushing toward what doesn’t yet.
A Different Perspective
On the other hand… when it comes to innovation, things are accelerating like crazy. New ideas are moving faster than ever. What used to take years now happens in months.
But innovation has always been driven by a relatively small group — the ones exploring new tools and pushing boundaries.
The rest of us?
We sit down every day and work with what’s already there. Stable, supported, well-documented. The kind of stack AI understands really well.
So yes — innovation is speeding up. But at the same time, AI might be making it easier than ever for everyone else to stay exactly where they are.
And that’s exactly why I hope I’m wrong.
So now I’m really curious — what do you think?
If AI had existed in 2011, would we have built the modern web faster… or would we still be comfortably sitting in index.php? 😄
If you made it this far, maybe consider giving me a like or even a follow on
LinkedIn 🙂
I’ll admit — I’m definitely not a LinkedIn master 😄 My reach there isn’t amazing (I usually just post links to my articles, often with a delay xD). But I think I might have an idea for some shorter-form content there…
Top comments (143)
Very interesting point. I once read that the Roman empire could have invented the steam engine and electricity. But manual labor was so cheap that tech progress promised no value.
In 2011, we had more fragmented browser engines compared to 2026, which is why we needed mootools and jQuery in the first place. Visual cross-browser development still isn't the LLM's strongest field right now. I can hardly imagine how they'd cope with it back then, and I guess Flash was also still around. But let's just imagine they did, either we'd be stuck in the millenium mindest or all browsers would support TypeScript natively and Angular, React, and Vue had all converged into a common, AI-written pattern library, and software hype cycles hadn't dared to introduce as many breaking changes. So, honestly, maybe I'd prefer that alternative reality.
I absolutely love this comment 😄
Also… you just reminded me that Flash existed. Somehow my brain keeps conveniently forgetting it 😅 I tried a few times back then, but my system just refused to fully commit to learning it.
And that alternative future you described, with native TypeScript support in browsers and some kind of converged, AI-shaped pattern library… I have to admit, I really like that vision. That said, I’m not sure I’d be that optimistic. My gut feeling is that we’d still eventually arrive at something like what we have today, just… later.
But then again, maybe later would also mean better.
Repeat the same though experiment in 2030! Then we'll know where the current LLM hype went and what it did to coding, maintenance, software architecture and management decisions. I think the current kind of AI arrived to quick and too early and nobody was really prepared, so the software scene is still moving on with their updates and breaking changes and AI will have a hard time catching up with all the outdated code out there. Then again, StackOverflow had a declining user engagement and their top-voted answer becoming obsolete, all without any AI. In the end, maybe AI doesn't make that much of a difference after all in the long run?
Haha, we’ll see! 😄
But this is exactly what I mean. AI often struggles to keep up and ends up suggesting outdated solutions. Even in simple demos I sometimes get older Tailwind versions pushed on me. Small thing, but it says a lot.
And you’re right, the focus is already shifting. At conferences, instead of talking about new technologies, we’re more and more talking about our “armies of agents”.
So yeah, in the best case, maybe AI won’t make that big of a difference long term.
But I really hope I’m wrong and that by 2030 we’ll all have flying cars parked outside our houses 😄
I have a few questions.
If letting the frontend orchestrate the state was such a good idea, why are modern javascript frameworks going back to server side rendering?
What makes the web modern?
Does AI speed up innovation?
What are the new ideas that really made a difference?
If I would answer what makes the web modern for me, it is making it possible to view a website on different screen sizes. Making sure the data you send to a website is not intercepted.
Do things like server side rendering and keeping state in the browser really matter? They are just tools that need to be used in the right circumstances.
I think what most developers shocks about the AI use is how little people care about what makes a technically good website. As a PHP developer I was aware long before AI by the use continued use of Wordpress.
I think as developers we have got ourselves a bit of a god complex. We tend to over-engineer. Only the newest technology is good enough.
And because AI is trained on "old" code I think a lot of developers experience a mental breakdown. Use AI to work faster, but what about the hottest new thing?
I think the developers that work with a more conservative mindset are better equipped to adding AI to their workflow. Because they are not going to use all AI features all at once.
Innovation is not driven by AI. Innovation is driven by humans.
It is the massive compute and memory that is at the base of AI that is accelerating some of the innovations. But that already was driving innovations. Not so long ago I saw the term supercomputers mention a lot when they announced breakthroughs.
So the question is how much is AI contributing to innovations?
For the question are you comfortable with index.php? I say yes, it is an entry point for the application that is found in every language, including javascript. Most call it main.
David, I swear I was thinking about you yesterday, like “he’d have a great take on this”, so I guess I summoned you 😄
I both agree and disagree with the idea that AI doesn’t drive innovation. On its own, sure, it won’t invent anything groundbreaking. But it’s incredibly good at structuring thoughts and speeding up iteration, which can indirectly accelerate innovation. It won’t come up with anti-gravity engines, but it can definitely help us get to good ideas faster.
And on the point about developers overcomplicating things… 100% agree. For me, this connects a lot with things like SSR. I get that we often build it for SEO, but when I see critical bugs in something like React Server Components, I keep wondering: if we know we don’t need SSR and probably never will (like in some internal or government apps), is it really worth forcing it in?
I’m working with Angular in that kind of setup, and honestly, the simplicity and stability saved me more than once.
The funny part is, the longer I write this, the more I realize I actually agree with you 😄 Although I’m not fully convinced that “modern web” is just responsiveness and security. I remember building things 15 years ago and… it was rough. We’ve definitely come a long way beyond that.
I agree with you modern isn't only security and responsiveness. Those were the two things that I came up with when I was thinking about the foundations of a modern website.
A component based workflow is a big improvement over the almost static templates of the old days. But I do think we didn't need to move render engines to the browser. So I consider that less of an improvement than the other two things.
You are right AI is a good tool when used wisely. When you read more than just the headlines, people that are deep in AI development acknowledge that they already had the idea before AI took the same route. This shows the potential, but we are not there yet. And maybe we never will?
Doing the same thing for the same problem/feature is not a bad thing, And that you can leave up to an AI. It are the solutions that aren't that straight forward that will require our attention even with AI.
Again, a great point.
I personally think SPAs are great, but exactly as you said, they’re just a tool, not a silver bullet. For me, they work really well in enterprise or government-type applications, but can be quite painful in e-commerce.
And yeah, the more complex, exploratory problems are still very much in human hands. A friend of mine builds advanced game engines and he often says AI just has no answers to his questions 😄
Absolutely true innovation is made by humans
@steve_fabricetegawendek Yes, BUT!!! 😄
Have you tried creating something with AI, whether it’s a story or an idea for an app? It’s honestly a powerful accelerator. Let’s not pretend it isn’t 🙂
This is a fascinating perspective. The idea that AI acts as a "stabilizer" by reinforcing the most documented patterns is a great counterpoint to the usual "acceleration" narrative. It makes sense that if we remove the friction of 2011-era development, we might have lost the incentive to innovate toward the modern stacks we use today. Excellent food for thought.
Thanks so much! 😄
Yeah, exactly — instead of React newsletters we’d probably be getting “top 10 index.php tips” in our inbox 😂
2011 huh. IIRC PHP and JS were not that dominant.
Flash and Java applets were the real deal around that time.
If there were AI in 2011, we would have really wacky Flash sites !!
And really insecure Java applets !!
Hahaha, thanks for bringing back those beautiful times 😄
And yes!! I remember that too! You could literally download a broken Java applet, poke around, fix something locally and just run it again like nothing happened 😂
Website owners hated this one trick. 😂
Hahaha, I remember that too 😄
There was a moment when people were seriously predicting the end of JavaScript… and here we are, with half the internet running on it and node_modules heavier than entire operating systems 😂
Now that I think about it. Lets say each megacorp guys owns their LLM tech stack. It would be a wild battle royale. We will have modern web but not open web.
1.) Sun making their own Java browser to run exclusive Java applets and content. Everything would be a java desktop app and web would be a minor secondary part. Compatible across all Operating systems. Windows , Macintosh, Linux , iOS , Android , Symbian. Windows Mobile,
2.) Microsoft and Adobe making silverlight browser which will allow them to assert flash dominance. It would run on windows and Windows mobile. But rest of them will have to use some sort of translation layer. You can run macros on microsoft websites.
3.) Apple will have their own browser which would allow you to only visit limited websites. Those websites need to be represented in some sort of Swift UI and they can only be hosted on apple servers which provide their own translation layer.
4.) There will be opera browser available which can browse all internet . People will use to download funny llm ringtones from zedge. And it wont break most websites.
5.) There will one separate bank app for each bank and it can only run bank website. This will be repackaged sun browser . It's like proton but in java.
6.) Google will be a search toolbar and not a website. Every query will open the intended app. Google will pay users to click and download new apps or listen to ads for 45 seconds.
Hahaha yes, exactly 😄
And don’t forget, in the Apple browser those same websites that are free in the Microsoft one would suddenly be behind a paywall 😂
Also I can totally imagine those 45-second ads per search… like “watch this ad to unlock your query” xDDDDD
First, congratulation for your next stand up: Rewrite of Refactor
I am also like to play with time, and I think your prespective of view is valid. LLM / agents is strong on avarage knowledge which cause a stabilization.
But also improve a creativity because speed up creative thinker process in any kind of topic.
Last: I drink my coffe much fasta than AI can solve any problem.
Exactly! 😄 Rewrite or Refactor does feel a bit like a stand-up sometimes, although there’s definitely plenty of technical depth in there too!
And I totally agree on the creativity part. For me, AI is a huge creativity boost as well, it really speeds up the thinking and experimenting process. But… yeah, there’s a catch. To actually use it that way, you need to bring some creativity yourself first. Otherwise it just reinforces the obvious paths.
And also, Mordor coffee absolutely wins this race ☕😂
Interesting Post. I'm seeing fewer projects that are genuinely solving a problem. In the early days of new tools, people would say "are you crazy, that's impossible" and yet these tools ended up transforming the software industry. Now it feels like we are mostly stacking abstraction on top of abstraction, and fewer people are pushing the table with crazy ideas that could actually change the industry by creating something that makes our life easier.
Btw, I wasn't writing code back in 2011, but I experienced that exact era for fun when I started learning before touching fancy frameworks. That raw friction of figuring out things out from scratch helped me a lot.
Oh yes, this is so underrated.
That whole phase of digging into the fundamentals, syntax, how things actually work under the hood, connecting the dots yourself, it pays off for years. I went through a similar phase at some point in my career, spending a lot of time on exactly that, and I still rely on it today.
It really changes how you see everything later. Frameworks stop feeling like “magic” and start looking like what they actually are, just tools built on top of those same fundamentals.
That’s also why I’ve never really been a fan of any particular framework. For me, they’re just tools. Useful ones, sometimes great ones, but still just tools 🙂
Do you got your beer using the htbmcp protocol? 😁
Hahaha Pascal, absolutely NOT! 😄 If it had been the htbmcp protocol, there definitely wouldn’t have been a hangover 😂
honestly, no - I think we'd have gotten to the same place faster. the frontend complexity wasn't driven by a lack of AI, it was product demands. AI would've just compressed the jQuery-to-React timeline.
Haha, we’ll see in 5 years 😄 I really hope you’re right!
And yeah, these thought experiments are fascinating. I love how they force you to look at the same reality from a completely different angle and suddenly things you took for granted don’t feel so obvious anymore.
2031 reminder set. and yeah - the best thought experiments are the ones that make you lose confidence in your priors halfway through
Hahaha, yeah, and then we’ll probably be sitting there wondering what things would look like without AI 😄
Like I said, I really hope I’m wrong and by then we’ll all have hydrogen-powered flying cars parked outside our houses!
the flying cars + no AI doom combo would be genuinely nice :) and yeah - those thought experiments that flip your confidence halfway through are the only kind worth having
Yeah, exactly, nothing beats a good thought experiment 😄 Especially right before sleep, just to make falling asleep a bit harder 😅
occupational hazard. phone notes at 11pm are basically thought experiment overflow at this point
This is a good thought experiment. There is only so much you can stretch improvisation or innovation through upgrades before reaching a saturation point. The present iteration of Bluetooth and WiFi protocols are essentially production grade, with little scope for innovation beyond minor optimizations.
While React may not be a perfect frontend framework, it's likely the peak of what can be achieved within the limitations of current W3C standards. There are no "framework tricks" left in the bag; any meaningful innovation now must come from an upgrade to the standards themselves. I doubt even WebAssembly can push the needle much further on its own.
If LLMs had existed in 2011, they would have hallucinated solutions using the tools of the era - jQuery, CodeIgniter, WordPress, or Backbone.js. Yet, that small group of innovators would have still conceived something like React, because the architectural vacuum for a reactive state library was still there to be filled.
Exactly—and that highlights the difference between optimization and paradigm shifts.
Most progress happens as refinement inside an existing ceiling: faster protocols, cleaner abstractions, better tooling, lower friction. Bluetooth, WiFi, and modern frontend ecosystems are examples of systems that have matured to the point where gains are increasingly incremental rather than revolutionary.
React’s success wasn’t just clever engineering—it arrived because the web had reached an architectural bottleneck. Complexity in UI state management had outgrown the tools of that era, and React solved a structural problem the ecosystem was ready for. That kind of leap doesn’t happen because someone stacks more tricks onto old tools; it happens because constraints expose a vacuum.
That’s also why LLMs, if dropped into 2011, would likely remix existing patterns rather than originate the next paradigm. Models are strongest within the language of the present. They extrapolate from what exists. But genuine breakthroughs often emerge when someone notices what doesn’t exist yet.
Innovation usually comes from tension: when current standards, assumptions, or primitives can no longer support new demands. At that point, the next React, next protocol, or next computing model appears—not as magic, but as a necessary response to accumulated friction.
So the frontier may not be “better frameworks” or “smarter autocomplete.” It may be new standards, new primitives, new interaction models, or entirely new computing surfaces that today still look unnecessary or impossible.
It's interesting! What do you think about WebMCP in this context?
WebMCP is interesting precisely because it fits this pattern.
If we think of today’s web as reaching maturity in many visible layers—frameworks, rendering models, component systems, deployment pipelines—then the next meaningful shift may not come from prettier abstractions on the page. It may come from changing how software systems connect, reason, and coordinate behind the page.
That is where something like WebMCP becomes relevant. Instead of asking, “How do we build another better frontend stack?” it asks, “How do tools, models, browsers, APIs, and services speak a common language?” That is a standards-layer question, not a framework-layer question.
Historically, those protocol shifts matter more than they first appear. HTTP mattered more than any single website. REST mattered more than many apps built on top of it. OAuth mattered more than countless login forms. Shared interfaces often unlock larger ecosystems than individual products.
If WebMCP succeeds, its importance would not be in flashy features. It would be in reducing friction between humans, AI systems, browsers, SaaS tools, and local software. Once interoperability becomes normal, entirely new products can emerge that currently feel too messy to build.
That said, adoption will be the real challenge. If existing integrations, browser APIs, and plugin systems feel “good enough,” many teams won’t move quickly. Standards only win when they solve enough pain to outweigh migration inertia.
So in this context, WebMCP feels less like a shiny innovation and more like a possible infrastructure move—the kind people underestimate early, then later wonder how they lived without if it reaches critical mass.
I’d push back on that a bit.
React is a great tool, but at the end of the day it’s still just a view library wrapped with an ecosystem. It doesn’t feel like the “peak” of what’s possible on the web.
A lot of what we’re seeing now is iteration on similar ideas, just packaged differently. The real limits are probably in the platform itself, not in whether we use React, Vue, or something else.
So I’m not convinced we’re anywhere near the ceiling yet 🙂
Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of "ai" because of a lot of reasons, but most of all because it's essentially really advanced T9/Markov chains on steroids and because a lot of people who drink the koolaid seem to forgo critical thinking. So if there's disdain in my tone, you're absolutely right. However, this disclaimer is relevantt and I am going to respond in-depth.
You touch on exactly the core of "ai".
Because the inconvenient truth is that "ai" has a knowledge horizon problem, and much like how the human brain works, its inherent internal statistical model and inference models merely improve on statistical connections between the internal vectors.
In human terms and as you already mentioned, "ai" favours the most common/valued paths.
Consequently, when an "ai" engine does not have a common path, it will try to extrapolate a solution, which leads to modelling outputs that resemble existing acceptable paths/patterns.
I.e. "ai" hallucinates!
One of the other challenges here is that the way we've trained "ai" implementations/models, has always been focused around externally controlled input. Or in other words, we pre-chewed the input for the machine. We gave it baby food. And because of that, to my best understanding at least, "ai" does not have a fundamental understanding of the more relationships between different concepts.
"ai" knows how to express a mathematical function and "ai" can (re)produce functions but does not have a more fundamental understanding of what E=MC2 than you or I do beyond that it statistically has to do with the speed of light.
Now... With all of that said...
I think the "ai" companies let the "genie" out of the box too soon. Because money needed to be made. I don't think humanity was ready for "ai".
I think that if current day "ai" was transported to 2010 or even 2000, it would've stifled progress. Because like you and others said... It just optimizes what exists and without money driving the need to progress and innovate, I don't believe that creativity would have come to this point.
Maybe some hackers would... But that lands me to the point of my disclaimer...
The magic thinking machines that is "ai" also seems to inhibit critical thinking.
If "ai" was more mature, then maybe. But looking at how management is already wooed by current "ai" and looking at the current state of "civilization", I have a really hard time seeing how "ai" would make a positive change at any point in the past.
Because after all, doesn't programming distill to a lot of below but repeated ad-nauseum?
Which drives home that "ai" as really advanced T9 is great at repeating things.
But "ai" can't synthesize that.
So we need to create content for "ai" to ingest, but if it can't synthesize and distill the underlying fundamentals, progress will always be restricted by our dependency on "ai".
And colonialism/capitalism says that progress isn't as important as making money.
So I have a hard time believing that we'd do better 10 or 20 years before than we do currently.
There's just more content "ai" could be trained on right now.
Just my 2 cents.
Very interesting perspective, there’s definitely a lot of truth in that.
I think tools like this, used consciously and in the right hands, can really speed up the more repetitive parts of the work. They’re also great for quick iteration or even just structuring thoughts.
I especially liked your point about business and innovation, because those two don’t always go hand in hand.
We’ll see how it all plays out. Thanks for such a thoughtful and in-depth comment 🙂
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