I am thinking of doing freelance web development for money, but also at the same time I’m not really sure about it because, why would they hire me, a human in a high-cost (high cost of living but I don’t even think it looks like a 1st world country anymore and the conditions only seem to be getting worse) country rather than use AI to do most of the work for either cheaper or for free or hire someone in a low-wage/low-cost country like India or Pakistan?
I mean, I’ve even noticed that most of my “local” businesses are doing something similar - instead of hiring local people, they literally go out of their way to hire immigrants (to the point where the locals feel like they have no chance of getting a job, especially Gen Z), just simply because the government has made it cheaper for companies to hire these immigrants instead of the locals. I don’t think they even care about the fact that ever since they started doing this, their quality of service has gone down. Nothing against these immigrants themselves, but I’m just saying.
If we’re talking about freelance scale websites that don’t have that much complexity, as others have said I think AI is a real threat because it’s something that has been done a billion times already. If you really want to stick to this then you need to either be the one taking advantage of AI in order to decrease development time and increase the amount of customers, or you need to be really creative and good at it so that some customers will prefer to pay you to get a quality result instead of AI slop.
Overall I think you’d be better off being a developer in a company instead of freelance nowadays, but that’s my purely vibes based opinion having only worked for companies and never tried freelance