Not long ago, building a professional website required real technical knowledge. You needed to understand hosting, domains, CSS, page builders, and dozens of decisions that kept most people away from it. The barrier was high, and that was the filter.
That filter is gone.
Today, anyone can describe a website in plain language and have something live in minutes. The tools are powerful, accessible, and getting cheaper. Claude Code, Lovable, and a handful of others have made web development available to virtually everyone.
You recognize it immediately, even if you can't explain why.
And yet, if you scroll through websites built this way without any real direction, a pattern emerges. The same glowing dot in the hero. The same button style. The same animations. The same color palette that nobody chose on purpose. You recognize it immediately, even if you can't explain why.
This is what happens when a tool becomes popular before people develop the judgment to use it well. It happened with ChatGPT and essays. It happened with DALL-E and illustrations. It's happening now with AI-generated websites.
The tool is not the problem. The lack of taste is.
For architects and design studios, this matters more than for most. Your website is the first thing a potential client sees before they decide whether your work is worth their time. If it looks generic, if it feels like it was assembled without thought, it communicates something about how you work — even if your actual projects are exceptional.
So the question worth asking is not whether you can build a website. You probably can, and faster than ever. The real question is whether the result will reflect the quality of what you actually do.
Same tools. Different judgment.
A website that represents a design professional well is not just functional. It carries the same qualities that make good architecture good: proportion, clarity, intentionality, and a point of view. Those things are hard to prompt into existence. They come from someone who has spent time developing a real eye for what works and what doesn't.
As these tools become universal, the websites that stand out will be the ones where someone genuinely thought about what they were building and why. The ones where taste was involved.
That is still rare. And that is still worth something.
The qualities that are hard to prompt into existence.
That is still rare. And that is still worth something.