Web development continues to evolve quickly, with new challenges, tools, and questions shaping how developers work every day. To explore what is changing and what is staying the same as AI introduces a whole new landscape of development tools and challenges, TinyMCE brought together experts from Postman, Bryntum, Laravel, and LocalStack for a live conversation about the future of the industry.
From improving workflows to addressing security concerns, let’s take a closer look at the knowledge they shared during the State of Web Development 2025 webinar. We’ll also peek at some of the panel’s predictions for the future of web development.
Answering the questions we’re all asking
On April 23, 2025, we brought together five experts from across the development world to discuss some of the questions that developers have been asking each other on Reddit, Discord, and and in hallways at conferences about how AI and AI tools for developers will change their workflow, the job market, and engineering. TinyMCE’s DevRel Manager Mrina Sugosh led the group through some of the most important topics impacting the web development world today.
These questions were a great jumping-off point for our panel:
- Brian Rinaldi, Developer Relations Lead at LocalStack: Brian is all about helping developers simplify their workflows, and has a gift for making complex cloud-native tools feel approachable and practical.
- Mats Brynste, CEO and Founder of Bryntum: Mats has a deep love of clean code and high quality UX, and has been building tools that let developers create fast, scalable web applications for 15+ years.
- Chris Sev, Director of DevRel at Laravel: Chris has a talent for breaking down full-stack development into clear, approachable steps, and for building communities where developers feel supported, encouraged, and excited to create.
- Pooja Mistry, Senior DevRel at Postman: Pooja loves to help improve developer workflows and build API literacy with creative and fun solutions that are bound to inspire anyone developing APIs.
Let’s take a look at the top three questions these experts answered that sparked some of their best insights. If you want to watch the full webinar, we’ve got the State of Web Development 2025 on demand.
How have you seen AI improve productivity in your specific domain?
Brian: “AI is great at boilerplate type stuff. Where it tends to fail is when you ask it to get a bit more advanced. I've found that there's a way to build incrementally, but when the task is more broad, I've found that it tends to fail.”
Mrina: “I took it upon myself to vibe code an entire full stack project. I think I coded more than AI had coded through that project. To give perspective, I totally agree with that. I think it's great for some of the smaller, more contextual tasks. If you ask it to refactor an entire file or maybe even ask it to set up some endpoints, though, it can hallucinate from time to time.”
Mats: “It definitely helps with the tedious heavy lifting. Stuff that I don't necessarily have cached in my brain, like advanced reg ex, complex CSS gradients, animations, transitions. If I can save some CPU cycles in my brain, I'm all for it.”
Chris: “Laravel's been around since 2013, so there’s a lot of content for AI to train on. So it's been nice to say, ‘Hey, I need an API backend, and I want it to have a user model like Microsoft Teams.’ And it kinda just does that. It's really been an accelerator for building out any kind of [Laravel] backend thing that you need.”
Pooja: “AI has impacted quite a few different places in the entire API life cycle. Anything from consuming APIs, finding and discovering APIs, using them in your workspace, testing them, and then to developing them.
The testing space has really seen a big boost in productivity. We have a tool called PostBot, which writes all the test scripts, so now we can build specifications instead. And nobody really loves writing YAML, but AI does.”
What ethical and security concerns exist around AI usage in dev tools and content creation?
Chris: "Everything moves so fast. The hype and the vibes are here. Right? So it's like, let's chase them. Let's keep going. Nobody really pumps the brakes and says, wait a minute. Just because I could, should I have? It is good to see companies coming up with AI security and parallel to that, building tools on top of AI that help monitor the AI content, and not leak sensitive data."
Pooja: "Integrating AI into any developer workflow brings great power, of course, but there's a lot of responsibility with that. So with great power, there's great responsibility. Specifically compliance, ethics, those things are pretty foundational.
On the Postman side of things, we have quite a few different security features that really help mitigate [data leakage]. We have a zero data retention option specifically for enterprise customers. We also have a tool called Postman Vaults, which is a local way to store all the sensitive data. And then we also have this thing called a secret scanner. So even if you accidentally did leak any data, it would get flagged."
Brian: "Each of these tools tends to be different. And we've all heard nightmare stories of people leaking their API keys or other sensitive data via AI. I know GitHub Copilot tends to only use the files that are open, and they don't store any of that data as far as I understand it. If you are working with very sensitive information or there are very strict requirements about security of the application that you're working on, I would say outright just don't use AI at all."
Do you see a future where a significant portion (60%) of web development and content creation will be handled by AI?
Brian "I have a lot of skepticism. I don't actually think we're that far from the end of the current cycle of AI. I don't think the current model of how these AI systems are built has much further to go. OpenAI's latest models don't seem that much better than their prior models.
What AI does can appear creative because AI is good at creating mashups, but AI is only able to create a mashup. It's not really creative. It's a predictive technology, it doesn't “know” anything. It's not knowledgeable. It has no actual skill. And who's making money on AI right now? What companies are making money? Zero. Nobody's making money... I think we're nearing the end of this particular cycle."
Pooja "I think it's a pendulum swing. Right? We go to country stores because we want human-made homegrown types of products sometimes. There's a charm to that. It could be a pendulum swing with everything being AI-ified.
I could see a future where people want to bring back the human made elements. Ethically, I do still feel like we have to tell this thing what to do. When we go down the energy side of things, it's like, what should I tell it to do that's actually worth it? Versus do I need to 10x my brain in these really menial tasks?"
Mats "I think it's all about also, how you frame the questions. You'll be linearly disappointed with the size of the task you ask for. So if you stay small, it might at times appear senior or mid senior, but the bigger the task, the worse the results.
Even if you get AI to throw in a couple of divs, buttons on the page, that's okay. That's step one. Now the softer topics, UX, design, it’s a no go. It's not text, so it will not do well. Maybe it will in the future, but I don't see that happening anytime soon."
Predicting the future: The next era of web development will be shaped by human creativity
These questions and more were asked at the State of Web Development 2025 webinar, sparking in-depth conversations between these experts on the ethics of AI usage, how useful it really is, and what it could look like in the future. And according to our experts in the webinar, that future isn’t racing toward unchecked AI usage; it’s shifting toward a considered balance between human ingenuity and strategic, ethical AI.
Brian pointed out that today’s AI models are hitting a ceiling, meaning they’ll stay crucial tools, but without the giant leaps we’ve gotten used to. Mats sees it too: AI excels at small, contained tasks but falters when it comes to the nuanced work of UX and design. These are the places where human imagination can’t be replaced. Developers will lean on AI for repetitive or foundational tasks, but the real work is still for humans, built on experience and true expertise.
Both Pooja and Chris predicted a future where human-made work becomes even more valuable and important. Mrina reminded us that authenticity will be the secret weapon for success, whether it’s in content, community, or developer relations. The future is about using AI wisely and ethically while putting humanity at the center of everything we build. It’s all about how we as humans choose to use AI.
Wrap up: Get the insights yourself
If you missed the live event, you can still catch all the expert insights that were shared. Watch the State of Web Development 2025 webinar on demand. This webinar was also shaped by data from two major industry reports that helped frame the discussion with valuable stats around AI adoption, developer workflows, and the future of content creation. If you want to dive deeper into the trends the panel explored, check out the full reports. They’re free, full of insights, and designed to help you plan what’s next for your projects.
