Templates are over - why buy a template when you can have AI build it
Courses - why pay for a course to learn how to build on Bubble when AI can build it for you
Developers - why pay for a developer to build the app when you can have AI build it
Bubble - why would anybody look at Bubble as anything other than an MVP tool. AI will build the app in minutes, bring the MVP to market for validation, get funding, and as now, in the future too, investors will give you cash, one to get off Bubble and rebuild in traditional code, and two to expand your user base. What this means for Bubble is that no longer will people pay a subscription fee for access to features they need during their development phase (because AI cuts it down to minutes from months, Bubbles’ revenues will go down - but of course, maybe this is offset by a larger user base because of AI). No reason for scaling on Bubble because the AI likely will be building apps that might not be as performant as required in 2024 and beyond, so makes leaving the platform for traditional code that much more imperative.
The only area of the existing ecosystem that will continue to be as lucrative as it is today, is Plugins. Is that why the largest Bubble agency has sold off almost all of their Templates and have been on a buying spree for Plugins? Yeah, probably.
Nah, AI has fat chance of materially changing Bubble.
The first layer of abstraction is traditional code. The AI must be able to code what you want traditionally. It can sort of do it in basic use cases now, but is weak in terms of visual stuff.
However, the challenging part is getting it to speak Bubble’s language (e.g providing a structured code that Bubble can read and interpret to form a page). The AI hasn’t been trained on that so it can only do so from Bubble’s prompting, or perhaps a little fine tuning.
I’m not worried about AI taking my Bubble job. I’d be more worried if I was in traditional development perhaps, but Bubble x AI is largely a white elephant project to appease both investors and low value new users who want to use Bubble like Squarespace.
Of course, if I’m completely wrong you can quote me two years from now and I can reap the embarrassment
I’m on @georgecollier side for now. And even if you think that user will not hire dev anymore… there,s always someone that will prefer to ask someone else to do the job, even just to talk to AI
After all, Bubble is no code tool no? So why are we Bubble dev?
It seems to me the only relevant question is, what can I as a human bring to the table that AI can’t. The list is not as short as some people think; and of course, it will evolve over time.
Many of bubble developers who have been at it for over a year or more are comically notorious for having awful build practices, security practices, and scalability. Not all but most. I’ve audited a few very large scale bubble apps doing multi millions in revenue with a team of developers and even those have severe scale & security issues.
Sure AI may help them design faster or in future do workflows faster but at this current point I’ve tried tons of AI design builders and they all can make something “pretty” but in all of them there’s always something wrong.
Either the content is off, site flow is whacky, doesn’t follow basic conversion principles, etc.
Even IF bubble can fix that aspect of AI design generators they still have to combat multiple app types, security, SCALABILITY, etc.
I foresee at least the next few years being safe, but fiverr shills and their $5 “websites” are going start moving to bubble & overall rates/expectations will absolutely change in the space.
There’s two side on that: dev and client. I’ve faced situation where client want stuff that doesn’t make sense to me, mostly on security side, but their choices…
That make me think of an offer this week for QA but have a team of dev…
I think devs will be fine. If a non-technical user creates a starter app with AI, they are still going to need a professional to help them when things go wrong or when they need to add features. At least for now, AI is much better at creating things from scratch than editing them.
I think the fear of AI comes from not understanding where we add value.
Examples:
Someone creates an app with AI, gets some sales going, hits a wall and needs help. Great - now you have a customer who has traction (i.e.: can pay you) and values what you offer.
Someone has a vague idea, wants to run it by you first, and you build the prototype right in front of them using AI tools. Hey that’s amazing! Now do this, and this, and this… it’s so much easier for them to get you to do it so they can get those sales and keep paying you.
Or, you’ve got an idea but you’ve got too many projects going right now and can’t seem to find the time to build a quick prototype to test it. Use the AI tools to test your brilliant ideas so you don’t even need scenarios #1 or #2, now that you are rich.
AI is the next step on Bubble’s value prop: faster results at a way lower cost.
I think if you are already good with technology, AI will help your career. It makes you that much more valuable.
I think this is the idea that is best at providing a sense there will still be a need for a Bubble developer. As the sense being, AI is good to start from scratch, but not good at editing things. So, Bubble developers will assist with adding in new feature sets, most of the time from my experience these are small gigs that a developer may need 5-10 of to equal one full app build.
In this sense, an analogy of cars comes to mind. Development agencies will no longer be able to be akin to a car manufacturing plant, but instead will become more like a local car repair shop.
I would imagine this is the task that the Bubble AI team of engineers are doing. So, they are training the AI with the expertise in Bubble from a Bubble engineers perspective (so the people that built Bubble and know its’ language better than any Bubble developer could).
Definitely a Buzz Word type of feature, that will attract more users, who are similar to the majority of existing users in that they are more inclined to be DIY to save on some money to put towards the marketing and promotion of their apps as opposed to investing in the development of the app.
As can I, and we both are humans that have an opportunity to monetize those templates in some way or another. When AI can do these as well, it no longer matters that we as humans can, since somebody who would otherwise want to start cheaply with a paid template, would be enabled to start with a free AI built app.
This seems to be the trend in the conversation. Bubble developer jobs might be safe enough because their job duties will become mostly filled with fixing issues in an AI built app, rather than just building the app from scratch in a proper way.
Valid point…but at what type of a rate are customers going to be willing to pay? Currently there are a few different methods of charging a customer, one is hourly rates, which obviously the time required to build with AI assistance is much less than human from scratch or with their own ‘templates’, so the amount of value (ie: total charge to customer) becomes much less, so we need a multiple of customers to equate to what today might be a single customer.
I would think the ‘now that you are rich’ would drive more incentive to pay a developer rather than use of the AI tool.
And hence why it is that a developer will either earn much less money, have to transition away from being a Bubble developer all together, or increase their marketing spend (this could be money or just time investment) to attract the higher number of clients required to equate to the same income prior to AI.
I think it makes it so the highly competent and expert Bubble developer will be seen as no more valuable than an experienced intermediate Bubble developer, since both can leverage the AI , because the value is the AI in terms of speed to develop and lower cost of development.
In the end, I believe that the AI by Bubble will make it far less lucrative to be a Bubble developer, unless this AI attracts 10x the number of new Bubble users, but that needs to coincide with Performance and Reliability improvements from Bubble. After all, when will a Bubble developer get that new client who needs them to add new features into the AI built app that as helped them gain traction and some revenues (ie: money to spend on further development) if Bubble is not fast enough or reliable enough to operate their business long term. I’d imagine majority of smart business owners will start to use those funds to migrate to traditional development that much earlier.
It is because of the backwards approach Bubble is taking, that will lead to the real problem. Bubble should have gotten performance up to par with 2024 expectations and made it so the platform has an uptime of 99.9%…then once those two things were done, work on the AI. Because, again, low performance hinders business scalability, and lack of reliability hinders business scalability. Both work in tandem to push users who have gained traction with their Bubble built app to find an alternative (likely traditional code) that can solve for both issues, so that the business owner can successfully scale their business.
Since Bubble took the backward approach and are introducing AI before they have fixed the long known performance issues and reliability issues, Bubble will be perceived even more so as the platform for building a cheap (or free) MVP with AI tools, gain some traction and jump ship to traditional code to scale. So Bubble developers lose opportunities to maintain apps, or add in new features, because the app owners will be investing into traditional code rather than the Bubble app.
What is more to this backward approach, is if the AI does what it should for the Bubble Investor, which is drive 10x on new user growth, without having fixed performance and reliability, well then, that 10x new user base is going to add even more strain on an already stressed system and we will see worst performance and even less reliability.
Bubble should walk without stumbling before they try to run. Bubble developers will be the ones to have their knees skinned when Bubble falls consistently when attempting to run to early.
Also, I believe that from the lack of discussion around the way in which AI is going to diminish or wipe out the course creator and template developer income streams, that it is commonly agreed this is true?
Expertise is valuable regardless of the underlying tool set. For example, I can do things with ChatGPT that a novice user absolutely can’t.
Also, no matter how easy to use the tools are, many folks that need apps built just do not have the time and energy to do it themselves even with the help of AI. They have customers to serve and businesses to run. AI might get them off the starting line, but is it going to get them across the finish line? Not likely.
The goal with AI is to speed up developers. It’s to empower developers. It’s not to replace developers. If you had a 10x boost in your productivity, would that not be a good thing for you and your customers?
Finally, I disagree that AI spells the end of the template market. AI is not going to reproduce something as complex as Canvas or as purpose-built as a vertical-specific template (at least not for a long time). And even if it did, that’s still good news. These things can be additive. I would be stoked if I could spin up a new app with my favorite template and then have the AI build out all my email notification workflows while I focus on logic that is actually unique and core to the business.
I believe AI has real uses and is already being used, but it’s definitely over hyped at the moment and we’re seeing a ton of garbage AI Products being pushed to market. Right now it’s the cool new thing, the space feels almost as whimsical as it did during the crypto craze. AI building apps for people in 2024 sounds like cryptokitties and NFT’s to me.
Procedural generation has real use cases (for instance, making great video games) but it can also be used to make NFTs. Same thing with AI - it can be used to make great chat bots that help coders and students alike, but it can also just be used as a tool to drive interest in investment in a company ahem
Capital investment and $$$ baby seem to be the top priorities of bubble right now. AI (who asked for this), agency ranking system, new rfp portal, WU, increased plan pricing across the board even for agencies are all evidence of this. To answer the question of this post, I don’t think that AI is going to kill bubble by making templates or developer obsolete. It is, however, another step taken to piss the community off and hurting its reputation. That might indeed kill Bubble in the long term.
I have already written a similar article in the monthly update topic.
I believe that AI can already make a meaningful contribution to improvement.
As a digital assistant that provides tips for improvement at any time. An assistant that analyzes both the database structure and the front end. The following suggestions could be made:
Better use the following search here:…
There is already a similar workflow in your app, it might make sense to create a custom workflow or a backend workflow to access it from different places
This workflow will probably use a lot of resources (WU), maybe you should modify it as follows.
The normal font size for such an area is 14px, you might want to check this option for better readability
This database entry could be better structured, you could summarize the following data
The type of this database entry would be easier to capture if you change it from a text field to an int field, this would replace the convert to number
There is no way to navigate from the current page to the following page, is that what you want?
The function of the plugin just installed can also be implemented natively with Bubble as follows…
I could certainly go on with the list.
The whole thing combined with the function:
Change now with AI, or
change by yourself
would certainly represent the best practices of Bubble for beginners and thus provide significant added value to make apps faster and more stable.
For me I can say that my template sales are going down to zero since June.
I tested the AI page creator and it creates always the same page structure regardless of the prompt. If you create lets say a Landingpage the outcome will always look like this. https://campainmanagement.bubbleapps.io/version-test/ai_landing_page_6
That is nothing more than a dummy page.
I think you are looking in the wrong place for disruption. Bubble isn’t going to disrupt itself (innovators dilemma) with AI. It will be another startup like cursor that disrupts the entire no-code space. Why build in no-code if you can build in code via prompt?
