Week 6 - BALT 4363 - Replit Experimentation

When I think about website design, I typically associate the process with the rather grueling undertakings I was forced to endure during the web design unit of my middle school STEM class. Since my time in middle school preceded the widespread accessibility and integration of AI (i.e., 2016-2018), web design was still done the hard way. More specifically, the web design platform used in my class was WordPress. The ease of contemporary drag-and-drop features was absent. Instead, manual file uploads were required, making the process of web design especially tedious. While WordPress had optional coding at the time, our class was required to write lines of code, which added to the already time-consuming task of creating websites. In short, I have consistently assumed web design to be a field exclusive to computer science experts and unfit for use by the average person. But after using Replit, I’ve seen firsthand how the strenuous tasks of coding and uploading for web design have been transformed into simple text-prompting chores. What would have taken me days to assemble in the past can now be created almost instantly.


As part of my experimentation with Replit, I asked CoPilot to give me a list of simple web design ideas that I could prompt Replit to create. Of the many options supplied by CoPilot, I decided to go with a random outfit generator website since it seemed rather complex and difficult to generate. I typed in all the information necessary to create the web page, and within five minutes, Replit was able to produce a fully formed and functioning website that integrated this random outfit generator. I found it interesting that this AI platform was able to create working applications. Typically, when you hear mention of AI, it is in reference to generative applications such as ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Gemini, rather than development agents such as Replit. As a result of tinkering with Replit, my perceptions of web design have shifted, and a newfound appreciation for the powerful capabilities of AI has taken hold.

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