I asked for AI in 2011 and didn’t realise it

The Wayback Machine turned up an interview I did with a site called The Meta Q in September 2011. I was a front-end developer in Glasgow, I described myself as a Digital Evangelist, and I spent most of it talking about ExpressionEngine custom fields and how much I hated the upgrade process.

Reading it back is mostly comedy. My two favourite add-ons were WYGWAM and Structure. My answer to what I do when I can’t solve a problem was that I’d go and make a cup of tea, or zone out on FIFA.

It’s the final question that got me.

The question

They asked what I’d like to see happen with ExpressionEngine or EllisLab in the future. My answer, in full:

I'd like to see ExpressionEngine actually design and build your website for you. Login to the EllisLab website, plug your brain in, download your thoughts for the project then crack open the cigars while your client pays millions for the privilege. Who WOULDN'T want that? Well actually, I'm not big on smoking, so I'll take a nice cold beer instead.

I was joking. It was the last question of an interview and I gave it the answer you give when you’d rather be funny than useful.

What I actually described

Take the cigars out and it’s a reasonably tight product spec. Log into a website. Describe the project in your own words. Get a built site back. Charge for it.

That’s Lovable. That’s v0. That’s me, most weeks, sat in front of Claude Code describing what a site should do while it writes the templates.

The part I thought was the joke, plugging your brain in, is the only part that’s still science fiction. The rest of it shipped. It just turned up as a text box rather than a headset.

The bit I got wrong

I assumed it would come from EllisLab. In 2011 that felt obvious. The CMS was the centre of the universe, so if anything was going to build your site for you it would surely be whoever owned the templating language.

That’s not how it went. EllisLab sold ExpressionEngine off in 2018. The thing that ends up writing my templates now doesn’t know or care which CMS I’m using this week, which is exactly why it’s equally happy in Statamic, Craft or plain Laravel.

I got the money wrong too. I said clients would pay millions for the privilege. In practice the tooling made building a site cheaper rather than more expensive, and the interesting work moved somewhere else entirely. Nobody is paying millions for a page of markup. They’re paying for someone who can tell whether the markup is any good.

In closing

There’s a version of this post that’s smug about calling it early. This isn’t that post. I didn’t predict anything. I made a daft joke about downloading my thoughts, and fifteen years later the daft joke is a subscription I pay for every month.

What I’d tell 2011 me is that the tea breaks and the FIFA still matter, because the hard part of this job was never the typing.

The offer of a cold beer still stands.