AI tools now handle a lot of the repetitive scaffolding in web development: generating a component from a description, writing boilerplate API routes, or converting a design mockup into working HTML and CSS. That shifts a developer's time toward reviewing and refining rather than typing every line from scratch.
Debugging has also changed. Instead of manually tracing through a stack trace line by line, developers can paste an error into an AI assistant and get a plausible explanation and fix suggestion in seconds — useful as a starting point, though it still requires understanding the codebase well enough to judge whether the suggestion is actually correct.
What hasn't changed is the underlying need to understand how the web actually works. AI-generated code that a developer can't explain or maintain becomes a liability the moment something breaks in production.