Titles Matter

Summary

Titles matter Published: August 26, 2025 Recently, I saw a post on Bluesky that did not sit well with me at all. I’m not going to link to it directly or mention the author, because I don’t want to direct any negativity their way. That’s not why I’m writing this. I do, however, want to respond to the core of what was said (and which some were agreeing with). That core sentiment of the post was this: Somebody who generates websites using AI prompting is also a web developer. The qualification is “do you build websites”, there are no other qualifications. I take serious issue with this assertion. The idea that anyone who manages to prompt their way to a website has earned precisely the same title as those who have hard-earned expertise in the web platform—and specifically, the idea that the lone qualification of said title is making a website live—strikes me as both a wildly distorted view of the job, and a derisive view of those who practice it. And so, I felt compelled to respond in disagreement. As the conversation went back and forth, it became clear to me that the core of the disagreement was the answer to a single question, eventually posed by the original author: “What’s your definition of a web developer?” So, this post is my attempt to both answer that question (to the degree possible), and to more fully explain my issues with handing out that title indiscriminately. Defining the terms I’ll use the term “LLM” quite a bit in this post. If you’re not familiar, an LLM is a Large Language Model, such as ChatGPT or Claude. These are more commonly referred to as “AI,” though I personally prefer LLM, as it’s more accurate; LLMs are not intelligent, let alone any kind of intelligence. Where I reference using an LLM, I may mean using one directly, or I may mean using an LLM-based tool, such as Figma Make or v0, or Claude Code, among many others. Next: because my stance is that a person who simply uses LLMs without further knowledge or expertise is not equivalent to a w...