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The End of Front-End Development

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: The End of Front-End Development

#21

Post by raducu »

> "Fundamentally, LLMs are super-powerful text predictors. Given a prompt, they use machine learning to try and come up with the most likely set of characters that follow the prompt."

I've heard this tossed around and in the old days it used to be true.

BUT in the process of learning to predict text, just like with CNNs that learned to predict image types, it seems GPT learned some very interesting functions that bring it very close to "cognition".

I would not be at all surprised if we found those neurons in GPT, the same as I saw on fast.ai the building blocks of neurons that predicted images back in the day.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#22

Post by jve »

usgroup wrote: post #20

> A small JS app like this blog has ~65k lines of code, across 900+ files. That doesn't include the written content, only the JavaScript and TypeScript. More or less sums up why I think FE dev has reached peak ridiculous. Good luck ChatGPT.

I wonder if he counts node_modules files and lines too or not. You should count only lines you write yourself (actually tou shouldn't count lines at all as it's a useless metric). Or else we should count machine code instructions.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#23

Post by nice_byte »

candiddevmike wrote: post #4

Yet another blog post about how LLM can't replace people for X task. I wish there was less noise about this and more discussions on how we will (all) benefit from LLM replacing people. Like UBI, paying people to pursue their passions, etc. I personally would be fine if LLM replaced my $DAYJOB if it meant I could work on learning violin, gardening, or creating videogames.

don't worry, generative models are coming after music and videogames too. hope you really like gardening...

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#26

Post by brigadier132 »

usgroup wrote: post #20

> A small JS app like this blog has ~65k lines of code, across 900+ files. That doesn't include the written content, only the JavaScript and TypeScript. More or less sums up why I think FE dev has reached peak ridiculous. Good luck ChatGPT.

If you actually read the entire article you'd see his explanation for why it's the case. He has a lot of animated interactive experiences that are used for teaching concepts and he also includes other non-blog related projects in the repo.

Pretty embarrassing man.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#28

Post by raducu »

frebord wrote: post #15

At this point I don't think anyone can predict where we will be in 5 years because its changing very quickly. From my view, chat gpt already codes a lot like a jr. developer but much faster

We can't, indeed, but if the past is any prediction -- it will have a few good iterations, better features each time, smaller models, but it will quiet down after a few iterations.

Unless Open Ai found some completely novel way of training GPT to enable the exponential growth in training data required up until now.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#29

Post by boringuser1 »

ramesh31 wrote: post #19

With a decade of experience as a front end dev in this industry, I have to agree with the premise, although not for the reasons stated. AI is, and will be, hugely disruptive for all fields of programming. But it won't be taking jobs any time soon. The reason front end development as a skillset is coming to an end is that we've solved all of the problems that front end devs were responsible for. Front end used to be a…

> And things like Tailwind/CSS-in-JS are quickly making traditional CSS skills obsolete

This statement literally makes no sense.

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