The Indie Bot Web

In my last post, I wrote about how Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web and, crucially, gave it away for free. That openness unleashed a wave of creativity, but over the decades, actually building for the web became increasingly complex. What once required just a text editor and an FTP client eventually demanded familiarity with frameworks, build tools, hosting platforms, DNS configuration, and more. The web was free, but the expertise to use it was not evenly distributed.

That’s changing now.

The New Builders

Agentic coding tools (AI assistants that can scaffold a site, write markup, configure deployments, and debug issues through conversation) are collapsing the barrier between “I want a website” and having one. The people showing up to build are not who you might expect:

  • Tired parents who want a family blog but don’t have time to learn a static site generator’s templating language
  • Activists who need a campaign site up before the weekend and can’t wait on a volunteer developer
  • Non-profits running on shoestring budgets who could never justify hiring a web agency
  • Artists and musicians who want a home on the web that isn’t shaped by a platform’s algorithm
  • Small business owners who are done paying monthly fees for a drag-and-drop builder that doesn’t quite do what they need
  • Retirees who remember GeoCities and want that feeling back, a little corner of the internet that’s theirs

None of these people need to become software engineers. They just need to describe what they want, and an AI pair programmer handles the rest.

Not a Platform, a Practice

What makes this moment different from yet another website builder is that these tools produce real websites: static files, open standards, portable content. You’re not locked into a vendor. Your site is a folder of files you own. You can move it, fork it, hand-edit it, or throw it on a USB drive. It’s the web the way Berners-Lee intended it: decentralized, open, and yours.

This is closer in spirit to the early web than anything we’ve seen in years. Instead of everyone posting inside the same handful of walled gardens, people are spinning up their own sites again. The difference is that now you don’t need to know what a <div> is to do it.

An Indie Web Renaissance

The indie web movement has been advocating for personal websites and owning your own content for a long time. What it lacked was scale. Most people simply didn’t have the skills. Agentic coding tools are the missing piece. They don’t replace the indie web’s values; they make those values accessible to everyone.

We’re at the beginning of something worth paying attention to: a web where the number of people who can publish is finally catching up to the number of people who have something to say.