The Barrier to Entry Is Lower Than Ever. The Standard Shouldn’t Be.
I’m going to rant a little.
Not because there are more people building websites.
Competition doesn’t bother me. There are more than enough businesses that need good websites, Shopify stores, apps, integrations, and everything else we somehow decided the internet needed.
What bothers me is watching the barrier to entry drop while people pretend the bar for actually knowing what you’re doing dropped with it.
Because those are two very different things.
You Can Build a Website in Five Minutes Now
And honestly? That’s pretty cool.
Between AI, templates, visual builders, Shopify themes, and tools that can generate entire interfaces from a sentence, somebody with almost no development experience can create something today that would have taken considerably more technical knowledge just a few years ago.
I use AI every single day.
I build with it. I troubleshoot with it. I brainstorm with it. I’ve watched it turn ideas into working features in minutes that would have taken me hours. (Although I still have to fix things it spits out as well. That's where the knowledge part actually comes in 🤔)
So this isn’t another “AI is ruining everything” article.
The tools aren’t the problem.
The problem starts when being able to generate something gets confused with knowing whether that thing is actually good.
Looking Good Is the Easy Part
A website can have nice typography, smooth animations, trendy cards, giant headings, and enough gradients to make a startup founder emotional.
That doesn’t mean it works.
Especially in ecommerce.
What happens when a customer changes variants?
What happens when JavaScript fails?
Does the product structure make sense six months from now when the catalog triples?
Can the merchant actually manage the thing without calling the person who built it every Tuesday?
Does it work with Shopify instead of constantly fighting Shopify?
What happens on a phone?
What happens on a slow connection?
What happens when an app changes the DOM?
Is it accessible?
Is it maintainable?
Does the customer understand what they’re supposed to do next?
Those questions aren't nearly as exciting as telling an AI tool to “make this section more premium.”
Unfortunately, they're the questions that matter.
The Part That Actually Frustrates Me
Bad work doesn't stay contained to the person who made it.
Eventually that business owner needs something fixed.
Or their store stops behaving correctly.
Or they want to add a feature and discover the entire site is held together by custom code, three apps, two prayers, and a script nobody understands anymore.
Then somebody else gets brought in.
And now we're not starting from zero.
We're starting from distrust.
The client already paid somebody once.
They already heard that everything was “custom.”
They already got promised that their website was optimized, scalable, SEO-ready, conversion-focused, and whatever other collection of adjectives was popular that week.
So when the next developer explains that something needs to be rebuilt properly, it sounds like another sales pitch.
That's the part that annoys me.
Bad work doesn't just hurt the client.
It makes things harder for everyone doing good work afterward.
Tools Don't Replace Understanding
There’s nothing wrong with starting with templates.
There’s nothing wrong with using AI.
There’s nothing wrong with using page builders, low-code platforms, starter themes, libraries, frameworks, or anything else that helps you work faster.
The difference is understanding what the tool is doing and knowing when its answer is wrong.
AI can write Liquid.
That doesn't mean it understands the merchant's business.
A template can create a beautiful homepage.
That doesn't mean the information architecture makes sense.
A generated app can technically work.
That doesn't mean anybody thought about edge cases, security, API limits, maintainability, or what happens when fifty stores install it.
The value was never just knowing how to type the code.
The value is knowing what should be built in the first place.
And Yes, Everyone Starts Somewhere
I certainly didn't wake up one morning magically knowing all of this.
I've built things I would never build the same way today.
I've written code I would now stare at for several seconds before quietly closing the file.
Learning requires making mistakes.
Experiment. Build terrible projects. Break things. Ask AI stupid questions. Build them again.
That's how you get better.
But learning a skill and selling yourself as an expert in that skill are different stages.
Skipping everything between those two points is where things get messy.
More Competition Is Coming
The barrier to building software and websites is going to keep getting lower.
I think that's inevitable.
And, despite this entire mildly irritated article, I actually think it's a good thing.
More people will be able to turn ideas into businesses.
Small companies will have access to tools that used to require huge budgets.
Developers will be able to build increasingly ridiculous things without spending three weeks reinventing a dropdown menu.
But easier tools shouldn't mean lower standards.
If anything, the opposite should happen.
When everybody can make something that looks good, the difference becomes everything underneath it.
The decisions.
The architecture.
The experience.
The reliability.
The understanding of the business.
And the ability to recognize when the shiny tool confidently produced complete nonsense.
Because it will.
Frequently.
The Bar Didn't Disappear
It just moved.
Knowing how to build something still matters.
Knowing why you're building it matters more.
And as websites, ecommerce platforms, AI tools, and development platforms become easier to use, I think the people who genuinely understand their craft will become more valuable, not less.
So bring on the competition.
Just learn what the hell you're doing first.
-Andrew