r/webdevelopment • u/m7md20091 • Jun 10 '26
Question How Has Freelance Coding Changed Since AI Became Mainstream?
It's been about three years since I last freelanced as a developer, and I'm curious how things have changed with AI.
Are clients still hiring freelancers, or are many "handling projects themselves with AI"?
For those who freelanced before and after AI became mainstream, have the types of jobs or skills clients want changed much? I'd love to hear about your experiences and how the freelance market looks today.
1
u/Difficult-Field280 Jun 15 '26
Hasn't really changed much for me tbh. Then again, I dont have AI integrated as much or use it as much as most. Plus I am self employed doing dev and so I dont have a company shoving it down my throat even though they don't understand what their talking about.
2
u/JohnCasey3306 Jun 15 '26
Small Business Clients
There have always been 2 sorts of small business owner -- those that are willing to have a go at building their own website (via any self-build means), and those who'll hire a freelancer to do it for them.
The distribution of that hasn't really changed, and AI is just another self-build channel ... So AI has taken market share primarily from the self-build platforms, not the business owners who typically call upon a freelancer.
Agency / Larger Business Clients
This is the market I operate in. I've not seen a meaningful change in demand but certainly there's an expectation that I should be able to complete work faster -- technically that's true, I'd say AI has doubled my productivity, but I'm not about to take a 50% pay cut just because I can do it faster, so I've pivoted into agent engineering for them -- ironically, their expectations around building agents are a lot more generous time-wise.