Quick deployment
The web has come full circle.
Twenty years ago I'd build a website in Flash, or HTML, and chuck it online via FTP. The result was messy, prone to getting hacked, and not anywhere close to professional. But, what it lacked in production-ready quality, it made up for in speed to delivery, crazy ideation, and an easy way to ship.
FTP really was that easy. Building ideas in Flash was easy.
Then the world grew up, security became more important, and Steve Jobs put the kibosh on Flash for mobile. I'm ok with that last part, but still miss a true visual builder that you could toss around ideas in and ship entire apps, games, and websites, inside a single project. Even Figma, may it rest in peace, wasn't a true replacement. It was more a photoshop for pixels, and less a Flash replacement.
As the web has matured I've tried my best to keep up. While my development skills atrophied, I focused more on design and user experience, and specialized.
That didn't stop me from wanting to be involved from idea to implemented code. So I kept my toes in wherever I could. But my skills were woefully inadequate for most real work.
Now, with the advance of tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT, it's possible to take ideas and run them all the way through to production—it's also dangerous again, and irresponsible (as my friend has shared) if you're not careful.
But what we've gained is something special. As a teenager I could tinker with ideas, and get them online easily. Now we're back to that.
You can play with a concept, use something like Netlify or Fly, and deploy your project in seconds. That means we have the potential of getting our projects from our minds and laptops into the real world.
There's also a risk, with that, where we focus on a bunch of crap at the expense of quality. Still, I'd rather junk for a little while and we'll see how things balance out. We spent too long with a world where the mere idea of considering building something required multiple hours of installing packages and perfecting local environment setups.
I've felt completely unlocked as a designer with LLMs and quick deployment—and of course incredibly wary of the potential risks involved, so I'm still treading very carefully—where ideas and exist, and we can test in the real world, quickly.
In case you're wondering how this works, try the following:
- Open your favorite LLM and ask it to build a "Hello world" website, add a note that you want it as simple as possible and you plan to deploy it to a free Netlify site.
- Ask your LLM how you can add it to https://app.netlify.com/drop, and test it out. (Take screenshots and share them if you get stuck).
If everything goes well you should be done in five minutes. That's magical. Once you see that hello world, you'll inevitably begin to wonder what else you can do—and therein lines a little bit of that magic that we creatives want.