Web Experts started in an era of green phosphor screens and noisy modems. That was the beginning of this career, and it shaped how we think about what a web page actually is: text, structure, and a connection that you could hear working.
Over the decades, the systems built to make the web easier quietly turned into something else. The tools, the frameworks, the layers of convenience became the very robots holding us back. They grew heavy, bloated, and slow.
When The Tools Turn On You
Every abstraction that was supposed to save time added weight. A site that exists mostly to inform people, to explain what a company does and how to reach it, was dragging around a codebase sized for something far more complicated. That is a strange trade to make and most teams never stop to notice they made it.
We decided it was time for a Death of a Robot moment. Not a refactor, not a cleanup pass, but a decision to kill the machinery that had stopped earning its keep. The goal was to honor the digital roots while stripping away the massive codebases that hinder the modern user experience.
Two Weeks, Three Agents
The work took two weeks of fourteen hour days, vibe coding with three different AI agents running in parallel. That is not a humble brag about grinding, it is a description of what it actually takes to unwind years of accumulated decisions. The agents were useful precisely because the work was tedious and unglamorous.
Working with three agents instead of one turned out to matter. Different agents approach the same problem from different angles, and when you are tearing out load bearing code, having a second and third read on a change is worth the overhead of coordinating them.
The Score Nobody Hits
The result was a breakthrough that did not seem possible for a site this informational. A perfect 100 Lighthouse score is one of those targets that gets talked about more than it gets reached, and content heavy sites are usually the ones that miss it. Images, fonts, tracking, and third party scripts all pull against you.
Hitting it required admitting that most of the weight was optional. Once the robots were gone, the numbers moved on their own. We have documented exactly how we killed the bloat, because the process is more useful than the score itself.
What Actually Changed
The lesson here is not that frameworks are bad or that everyone should hand write their markup again. It is that the tooling you adopted five years ago was solving a problem you may no longer have. Nobody sends you a notice when that happens, so you have to go looking.
The evolution of the craft runs from green screens to vibe coding, and the throughline is the same in both eras: the page should load fast and get out of the way. AI agents made the demolition work feasible on a two week timeline. The decision to do it at all was the harder part.