I often turn to the saying "Rich people don't talk to robots". Time poor people want things done for them not by them. The agency of action needs to be delegated.

Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.

Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.

Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.

To add onto this, I used to frequent a cafe near my old work and had quite a good rapport with the owner. One day I was going for lunch and wanted to check their menu, pick something new and then go order. When I went and ordered it she said she they no longer serve that and couldn't get onto the developer to change their menu on the site. They were a couple working 7 days a week, only taking public holidays off, so it was easily the least of their concerns.

Yeah, setting up a website is a pain.

But in reality there’s only a handful of things people care about for your restaurant: what, when, and where. Put up your menu, put up your hours, and put up your location. And a phone number.

My partner is an outdoor ed teacher at a no-screens school. I tried to teach her to code a few months back and it was hilarious. We started with "First download VS Code". We never made it to another step.

I had a similar experience showing her Skyrim. She never quite figured out how to walk and look at the same time. Made for an absolute berserker of a barbarian.

In any field, when you're surrounded by competent people, you'll begin to take that baseline competence for granted. I think especially so in ours due to virtual forums. I can work with my peers all day, go home, and talk with more online. It's enlightening to walk a curious outsider through your day (and probably also a great test of the systems you have in place).

I know a twelve year old kid who is proactively using LLMs to build websites for lawn-mowing businesses, calling them up, asking them if they want it for $200, and closing deals in seconds.

I know it sounds far-fetched, but he does all the work up-front before even contacting them, using logos and info from Facebook or Google. He's cleared several thousand dollars so far.

I get that the owners aren't going to be the proactive ones who have the awareness, time, or vision for doing this, all your points are valid. However, AI has definitely changed the calculus here--I'm glad I'm not a web dev anymore.

I read comments such as:

>> I don't get it. LLMs are supposed to have 100% bridged this gap from "normie" to "DIY website." What's missing?

as less sincere and more facetious, calling out that every single "AI" company is massively overhyping their capabilities and use-cases. You did the same thing in a more detailed fashion, enumerating all the constraints that AI can't address, and others that speak to the reasons that small businesses don't have websites independently of the tooling/services that are ostensibly able too make it easier or remove barriers.

I saw a meme one time that went something like this:

"AI is so cool, I asked ChatGPT to combine a card game with a flight simulator and it did it!"

"Yeah, that is pretty cool I guess."

"My question for you is, what do I do with the code it gave me?"

"What?"

"Where do I put the code to make a game?"

Doesn’t something like Wix take care of all of this?

Reminds me a little of something I wrote once:

https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2021/01/easy-peasy/

The way to get a website for your small restaurant used to be having Jim's nephew make one for you and you'd give him a pizza and a six pack as payment for setting it up.

There is now platforms that make it as easy as social media sites. wordpress shopify etc

I accept that as a software developer, I have a myopic view on it, but it doesn't have to be hard.

- Get a domain name

- Get a VPS with an nginx image pre-installed

- Write a plain text file with the info you want shown (hours, contact info, etc...)

Yeah it's not sexy, but it's a start and it can be changed when time and interest allows.

I miss Geocities so much. It was so simple, open an account, drag some files and done you have a website. What happened? Why is it so hard to have a static website now?

I miss those cheap something-middle-in-webhosts-and-microblogs hosts

Part of the problem is that there's no accepted standards for the minimum website worth making. This is very much a fault of the "website people" because they don't want to sell you a five page static site with the most complex feature being a php script that runs a couple for loops to put formatting around images and text.

Other than basic description and contact info that's all 99% of small businesses need (as evidenced by the fact that they use social media in exactly that way)

I prompted claude and it wrote me a pretty good landingpage. Thats all I needed and its never been more easy to have that html file. The hard thing for users is to host it and configure DNS, but that is free with cloudflare, just need to buy a domain name.

But even buying a domain name can be too much for some people as facebook is "free"

Thank you for the much needed refresher on what running a business actually entails for many.

I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world by offering IT services in my local area, and I'm getting a good amount of traction. Might need to take on a second person soon. Turns out small business owners especially have a lot on their plate, and if you're tired of their WiFi sucking ass, odds are, they are too, and if you offer to fix it for a reasonable price, they'll pay you.

Hell I unfucked a local place's WiFi for the cost of a free meal for my wife and I because I couldn't browse Imgur whilst eating lol

Squarespace made a business simplifying all that. It's expensive but there are templates and it had a WYSIWYG editor.

And security

Sounds like what we need is Facebook pages, except as a free service from the government or non-profit.