Time for the AI hype-men to touch some grass. Anyone claiming they have 10x super powers now has most likely only dealt with hello world problems in their current job thus far.
The End of Front-End Development
61–70 of 111 posts
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#62I say it a lot, but I'll say it again:
"The code isn't the hard part of the job"
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#63With 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…
UIs have become more complex in parallel to more sophisticated tooling. Most websites now use persistent state and are reactive, where before those features were not as widespread. So I would say it has evolved, and the entry point for FE dev is closer to typical app development than before (which was closer to design and scripting).
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#64> "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
What if you train her with then right data?
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#65With 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.
Indeed, I'm not sure how people can use Tailwind or Css-in-JS without, well, knowing CSS. It's literally CSS as another DSL.
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#6690% of frontend development is gathering the requirements. The other 90% is trying to get CSS to center a div.
This was (sort of) funny 5-7 years ago.
Meta: Stuff like this doesn’t really fit in HN imho. Besides being low effort it just feels weird to read things like this on a site literally called hacker news. I feel like someone misspelled “tired techies complaining about the same thing over and over again”.
Is it that much harder to come up with a genuinely funny or constructive answer or, you know, go outside, and touch some grass instead of posting?
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#67It's definitely going impact simple frontends that don't need complex app logic. Arguably that is already the case with so many of the existing frameworks taking over, but now if you don't need a framework chances are it can be easily generated.
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#68> 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.
Either it’s a “small JS app” or it’s “~65k lines of code, but not both :-)
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#69Yet 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.
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…
You won't pull yourself up by your bootstraps with that attitude! You can learn to play the violin and be homeless( Typical slacker complaining instead of just being willing to multitask).
Re: The End of Front-End Development
#70Yet 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.
Why bother learning violin or creating video games when AI does it much better and faster?
This is actually an interesting question that I also see in the AI art and artist debate. The trope is that "people thought AI would replace mundane jobs leaving room for creativity, now it's automating my creative job, why even bother making art?" The answer is the same as why anyone does any hobby at all. We still run despite making cars, ships, planes, rockets that go at hundreds of miles per hour. We still play chess and Go even though an AI can beat every human on the planet. We will still make music even if AI does simply because we want to.
Now, to expect to do a hobby as a job, forever (coding, art, music, whatever), that is a very privileged position to be in and most people in human history have not been that fortunate.