A few days ago (around September 8), one of Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon (a researcher) left the company and claimed that AI companies are not doing enough to prevent AI from exterminating us in the next decade. But why would it want to exterminate us?
AI can now design a website in minutes. The problem is that without clear direction, it often produces a safe, interchangeable result: a purple gradient, three identical cards, rounded corners, a huge headline, and a few animations “for effect.” AI is not a bad designer. It just guesses what you want by default. The good news: generic design is not an inevitable result of using AI. You just need to change how you work. Don’t ask it to “make a modern landing page”; give it context, constraints, and feedback.
I use a lot of tokens and often end up in a situation with Claude AI where I have to wait several hours before I’m allowed to work again. In those free moments, I often like to do something offline or try new things, such as installing Ollama. Software that can run an AI model locally on your computer.
When I was building FakturHuko, it was at a time when I needed an alternative to Fakturoid, which had suddenly become much more expensive. Over the weekend, I managed to create an online app that did exactly what I needed. What I wasn’t looking at then was the design. But now the time has finally come to focus on the project’s visual side as well.
When you finish a website or app, the practical question comes up: where should you host it so it runs online? For smaller projects, three services often make sense today: Netlify, Vercel, and Railway. Simply put: Netlify and Vercel are best mainly for websites and frontend projects, while Railway is a better fit for applications that also have a backend or database.
When you use AI to create a new web project, it’s important to choose the right technologies and to tell the AI which ones you want to use for your project. If you don’t, AI may choose a technology that isn’t ideal for your project. For example, if you want a custom cooking blog and AI builds it with React, your 100 articles about eggplant and carrots may never appear in Google search results. Here is a basic overview of suitable technologies for different types of projects.
A few days ago, I decided to create an account on Reedsy.com, a great tool for book writers. On this platform, they can not only write, but also choose the right professional to handle marketing, design, a new website, and more. I’m very interested in this whole field because I’d like to write a book myself. I’ve been dreaming about it for several years. So I wanted to be part of it, at least for now as someone helping those who have already written something.
When I added recurring invoices to FakturHuko, it quickly became clear that it was not just about automatically issuing the next invoice on a given date.
We have three main AI competitors: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Each of these models has its own subscription that lets you use the AI tool to the fullest. You may expect me to recommend which one to choose, but unfortunately... I haven’t chosen one myself. Why?
AI has shaken up web development a lot. Clients are coming in saying they’ll build their websites themselves with AI. Companies that used to hire freelancers like me are shifting their work toward people in permanent roles, because they don’t bill by the hour and can get things done faster with AI, handling more work.
It has been a few years since it became standard for menus to sit at the top of a website. And even today, I still think that on desktop it is often a poor choice.
I’ll soon write an article about what inspired me to create a clone of the Fakturoid invoicing tool, and how I improved it for my own use.