For 2026, resolve to make the web creative again

A long time ago, in an internet far away, developers innovated on the web.

This holiday season I've been reminiscing on where the web has gone over the years, and not in the way most old folks lately have been (I don't think gender identity is that fucking complicated, folks, so get with the times).

While we have all sorts of great new technology to create on the web, and it certainly has gotten more complex, we seem to have lost a certain brave new frontier spirit in how we create on the web.

Let me Wayback Machine you for a bit, here.

Over half my life ago, my fellow netizens would push eachother to create cool shit. We'd also share cool shit we found. One site myself and a bunch of my peers fucking loved the design language for was Phong.com (that's a Wayback Machine link, FYI).

That was something to see back in those days, let me tell you, and we all strove to do better. We wanted the web to be visually interesting as well as informative and entertaining. As creativitiy on the web grew, you'd see sites pop up dedicated to sharing the insanely cool shit we were all making. Having a badge on your site that says you were featured on Design Inspiration Site XYZ was a point of pride for us.

Hell, I myself managed to get noticed enough with one of my designs to get featured in a Smashing Magazine listicle (that article - from 2008 - has lost a lot to formatting migration errors over the years).

I don't know when it happened, but I feel like we've lost that spark on the web. As we built out more formal awards systems alongside standard frameworks for content, the creativity we saw also began to diminish.

I myself won a W3C Silver Award for a website I honestly hated for it's bland, forgettable corporate structure.

WIth vibe coding? It's only going to get worse; AI can do some interesting shit, but it absolutely cannot design and code what you see in the hero of my website (as of Dec. 2025, FYI, for future readers who are visiting after another redesign - do we have flying cars yet?).

Hell, on a lark I decided to "vibe code" a Gnome shell extension to show the current status of my firewall with a simple indicator icon; I wasn't planning on investing any time into learning GJS since I just needed this one little thing, but.. Well, it honestly would've been faster for me to just learn GJS.

It couldn't fucking figure out how to create a goddamned circle and vertically center it. It built a good scaffold, and even came up with a better idea for checking the status of the firewall than what I had conceived (checking the config file vs. requiring sudo access to run ufw status), but I ended up fixing the rendering portion myself.

Here's where I do my call to action:

If you want to really create something magical, you need to hire passionate people again.

There's an old rule for creating anything: Cheap, fast, good - pick two.

Vibe coding and basic builder platforms can only get you so far, and I'd like to suggest we append something to that statement.

Cheap, fast, good - pick two.. Or hire someone to create something great.

The web dev industry has lost it's way, but we can bring it back. We need to start putting out cool-ass shit again. We need our portfolios to showcase creativity on top of conversion metrics. We need a goddamned internet revolution again.

We need clients willing to take goddamned risks and do something new.

Be that client. Be that developer. Be a part of the revolution.