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The End of Front-End Development

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: The End of Front-End Development

#41

Post by edgyquant »

candiddevmike wrote: post #12
NationalPark wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs not existing isn't the reason we don't have UBI or free healthcare, or stipends to pursue passions. I think most people are understandably concerned that the benefits of these new tools will primarily accrue to the tiny elite who can afford to control the compute resources and therefor mediate access to the models. If LLM replaces a bunch of $DAYJOB you won't have people learning violin, you'll have widespread u…

> If LLM replaces a bunch of $DAYJOB you won't have people learning violin, you'll have people arming themselves and raiding stores of food and medical supplies. Thus the need to start talking about how we will all benefit from this and demand those kind of outcomes...

This isn’t how anything works dude. Automation doesn’t mean less work it means each individual can be more productive. We’ve been automating jobs for centuries, your dream of doing nothing is just an infantile dream that we all have to get over at some point.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#43

Post by beardedman »

ChatGPT has way more of a probability to hit the singularity first, thus rendering all coding efforts futile & useless, whilst it ushers in the machine apocalypse. So write that FE framework before you get taken away and used as a bio-battery for the great machine king.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#45

Post by bluefirebrand »

chunk_waffle wrote: post #5

AI won't take of front-end dev jobs until it can start creating a new framework every week, constantly break backwards compatibility, then abandon the project and start a new one.

AI can probably take that weekly framework cycle and crunch it down to daily framework cycles.

It will churn through frontend frameworks way faster than humans can.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#46

Post by JohnFen »

cameronfraser wrote: post #27

"augmenting, not replacing" has been my go-to line for people who are anxious. There is no real meaningful discussion taking place about replacing people, it's just about augmenting people.

I'm not anxious at all about being replaced, but...

> There is no real meaningful discussion taking place about replacing people, it's just about augmenting people.

I guarantee that there are discussions taking place in countless executive meetings trying to figure out how to replace people with this tech. People are expensive.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#47

Post by pagutierrezn »

raducu wrote: post #21

> "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 bri…

My mothe-in-law is almost deaf. However, as you said, she is a good example of a "super-powerful text predictor". She almost always predicts what you're talking about even not hearing a single word. And most of the time she offers meaningful answers just as GPT does. But not always (same as GPT)

I don't expect, however, that she will program front ends any time soon

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#48

Post by dkersten »

hk__2 wrote: post #34
fswd wrote: post #30

90% of frontend development is gathering the requirements. The other 90% is trying to get CSS to center a div.

This jokes only works if you never used flex.

Flexbox makes it a lot easier, but it’s not fool proof. I’ve had situations where even flex refused to center something because it was ensured strangely (but out of my control), or because the containers size wasn’t being inherited correctly (again be a use of parent elements out of my control).

Compared to something like Qt/QML’s anchors and layouts, flexbox still feels like a crude hack, to me.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

edgyquant wrote: post #41
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If LLM replaces a bunch of $DAYJOB you won't have people learning violin, you'll have people arming themselves and raiding stores of food and medical supplies. Thus the need to start talking about how we will all benefit from this and demand those kind of outcomes...

This isn’t how anything works dude. Automation doesn’t mean less work it means each individual can be more productive. We’ve been automating jobs for centuries, your dream of doing nothing is just an infantile dream that we all have to get over at some point.

Automation means less work for any given value produced, which means greater quality of life across the board unless this increased productivity is offset in its broad effects by increased capture of value by narrowly concentrated capital.

Which makes it kind of suck if you have an economic system that is so centered around maximizing the concentration of capital and the extraction of value by that class that it is named for it, but the problem there isn’t automation.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#50

Post by jonny_eh »

potatolicious wrote: post #39

There seems like a disconnect between the breathless AI hype and reality. I tend to be on team-LLM (having exposure to it in my daily work), and my stance is that it's going to revolutionize some narrow domains and features of products, but the idea that it will replace white collar labor generally seems poorly substantiated by what we know so far. What we see ChatGPT being good at is largely boilerplate . The folks…

I find an engineer's value is in creating things have not been created before. As the author of the article says, there's already lots of great tools for making simple sites. So far, I've found that LLMs are not good at making novel software, it's basically a glorified stackoverflow. But that's still quite useful… for a programmer!
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