Most writing about AI in web development is written by people who don't build websites. It arrives as a list of tools, a prediction that developers are finished, and a call to action for an agency that will sell you the future. I've read a lot of it and recognised very little.
This is the other version. I run a one-person studio and ship client sites with AI assistance every week, so the claims here are ones I've had to live with afterwards — including the ones that turned out to be wrong. I also built and run WebSeek.ai, an AI website generator that takes one prompt to a deployed site with a model picker for Claude, GPT and Gemini. Running the same product on three providers at once means the differences between them are things I've debugged at 2am rather than read in a comparison table.
That gives me two vantage points most writing on this topic doesn't have: I know what AI genuinely does to the economics of building a website, and I know exactly where it stops being useful — because I've shipped the product that hits that ceiling.
The short version, before the articles: AI has substantially changed how fast the mechanical parts of a build go, and has changed almost nothing about the parts that decide whether a website works. Judgment about what to build, why a visitor hesitates, which trade-off to accept — all still yours. Anyone selling you the opposite is selling something.
The articles below are grouped by what you're trying to do. If you're deciding whether to hire a developer at all, start with the third group. If you're a developer working out how to use these tools well, start with the first.