Notes — 05 · July 2026
Good got cheap
Give the tools their due first, because pretending they are not good would be dishonest and you would spot it immediately. You can now describe a business to a piece of software and have a working website an hour later. It will be responsive. It will load quickly. It will look tidier than most of what was being charged five thousand dollars for a decade ago.
That is a genuine achievement, and anyone in this industry telling you it is rubbish is protecting their pricing rather than telling you the truth. For a lot of businesses, that hour is honestly enough. A tradesman who needs a phone number, an address and proof of existence does not need a studio, and I will say so.
But something follows from that which almost nobody says out loud. If anyone can produce a good website in an afternoon, then having a good website no longer tells anyone anything about you.
Good used to be the ceiling. It is now the floor. And a floor is not a differentiator, it is an entry requirement. When your three closest competitors all have clean, fast, perfectly reasonable sites, being clean, fast and perfectly reasonable makes you invisible rather than credible.
Three things a generated site cannot see
This is not about the code being bad. Usually it is fine. It is about the things nobody is looking at, because the person who asked for the website did not know to ask, and the thing that built it does not know what it does not know.
One. What you owe people
Australian businesses tend to assume web accessibility is an American problem, or a government one. It is neither, and the precedent is from Sydney.
In 1999 Bruce Maguire, who is blind, complained that he could not use the official Sydney Olympics website. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found in his favour, holding that information provided on a website is a service under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and that providing it in a form usable by sighted people but not by him was discrimination. The organising committee did not comply with the orders, and was made to pay him twenty thousand dollars.
A website is a service, and services have obligations.
That case is a quarter of a century old and it still catches people out, because the obligation sits on the business that publishes the site, not on whoever or whatever built it.
Maguire v Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, HREOC, decided 24 August 2000. The Commission has since recommended conformance with WCAG level AA. Australian Human Rights Commission.
I am not a lawyer and this is not advice, so treat it as a prompt to ask someone who is. The point is narrower and harder to dismiss: a generator will happily give you a beautiful site with no keyboard navigation, unlabelled form fields, text at a contrast nobody over fifty can read, and a privacy policy it invented that describes data handling you do not actually do. Nothing in the process flags any of it, because none of it looks broken.
Two. What it got wrong while sounding certain
The security question is not really about whether machines write bad code. It is about what happens to the person holding the result.
Stanford ran a controlled study on exactly this. Forty seven people completed five security related programming tasks across three languages, half with an AI assistant and half without.
The group using AI wrote less secure code, and was more confident it was secure.
The authors' own conclusion is that these tools can give inexperienced users a false sense of security. Not worse code and known risk, which is manageable. Worse code and higher confidence, which is not.
Perry, Srivastava, Kumar & Boneh, Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? Stanford University, published at ACM CCS 2023.
If you have a contact form, you are collecting personal information. If you take a deposit, you are touching payment. If you run a login, you are holding credentials. None of those are exotic, all of them are the business owner's responsibility, and the confidence problem is what makes it dangerous. Nobody audits a thing they already believe is fine.
Three. What makes you you
The first two are the ones that could cost you money. This is the one that quietly costs you work, and it is the reason I bother.
Ask a generator to build a site for a Sydney building firm and it will produce something competent about quality craftsmanship, trusted service and attention to detail. Ask it again for a different building firm and it will produce the same site, because it is working from the same average of every building firm that has ever existed.
Every one of those sentences is true. Not one of them is yours. They describe a category, not a company, and a prospect who reads them learns nothing except that you are in the same business as everyone else they are considering. You have paid nothing and received nothing, which is a fair trade until you remember what the site is for.
The things that actually separate you are almost never the things a business puts on its website. It is the fact that you turn up when you say you will. That you did the awkward job nobody else would quote on. That your clients have followed you across three companies. That is what makes someone choose you, and it is exactly the material that gets averaged away.
The false economy
The maths that leads a business here is completely reasonable. Why pay for something you can produce in an afternoon.
The part that is missing from the sum is what you are actually buying when you pay for a website, which was never the pages. It is somebody deciding what matters and being accountable for the answer. Take that out and the cost does not disappear, it moves. It turns up as the enquiry that never came, the trust you spent without noticing, the obligation nobody checked, and eventually the rebuild in eighteen months when it becomes clear the site is not doing anything.
A site that saved four thousand dollars and quietly under-represents a business turning over two million is not a saving. It is the most expensive thing on the balance sheet, and it never appears on it.
A word for the old ones
Plenty of the sites I see are not generated at all. They are ten or twelve years old, built properly by someone competent, and they simply feel stiff now.
That is not a criticism of whoever built them. What can be done in a browser today genuinely did not exist then. Real depth, real motion, type that behaves like type, three dimensional work that runs on a phone without a plugin or a wait. The people who built your site in 2013 did good work with what they had. The gap is time, not talent, and it is worth saying because the owner of a dated site usually feels vaguely guilty about it, and there is nothing to feel guilty about.
So what is great
Great is not a longer list of features, and it is definitely not whichever tools I happen to use. I build with a lot of things, including the same ones everyone else has. Naming them would tell you nothing, in the same way that a surgeon listing their instruments would tell you nothing.
What I would rather be judged on is the decision underneath. Great is what happens when somebody looks at your business, works out the one thing a stranger has to feel in the first few seconds, and then builds the whole thing in service of that one feeling. Sometimes that calls for the full craft, a scene rendered in three dimensions, motion that carries an idea rather than decorating it, a page that unfolds like an argument. Sometimes it calls for a single sentence, set large, on an empty page.
The skill is not in being able to do the first one. It is in knowing which of the two your business needs, and being willing to say so when the answer is the cheaper one.
A generated site cannot make that call, because it has never met you, does not know what your competitors look like, and has no stake in whether the phone rings. That is the whole difference between good and great, and it has almost nothing to do with the software.
If you want to know which of the three your own site is quietly falling into, that is what the audit looks for. It is two minutes to ask for, and if the honest answer is that yours is doing its job, I will tell you that instead.