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The End of Front-End Development

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: The End of Front-End Development

#91

Post by adamredwoods »

Julesman wrote: post #71

I'm a dev using ChatGPT and CoPilot. I work more efficiently as a result. Currently I don't think LLMs represent a risk to my job in that I work for a small company and personally handle many aspects of the development process on my own. However, at a larger company where those roles are spread out I could see some of them going away soon. I work on a large WordPress theme. If an LLM were trained on that theme it cou…

I agree. I simplify it as boilerplate coding versus maintenance coding.

I worked at a job where I built out UI templates for a larger system. I could see that job reducing to perhaps more of an QA or automation engineer to manage the pipeline. Too bad, though, as that job was menial but gave me the longer term skills of muscle memory to write out HTML code.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#92

Post by anonzzzies »

You have a camp that keeps saying it will replace jobs (me, and it already does) and another that says it does not. If you want a good future, you don't care about either camps and use this as another tool. I don't like frontend, but now I don't need to ask someone else (and in that way it is replacing people we now mostly no longer need); I can just do it myself with chatgpt. Don't get me wrong, I know how to use html, css, react, vue etc but I hate doing it and find it all pretty much a waste of time; now chatgpt does it so I can do something else. I would say most people can do it with the stuff they don't want to do. Who cares if it's frontend, backend or whatever. Use it as a tool to gain an advantage; you will be ahead in many possible futures.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#94

Post by ibn_khaldun »

rikschennink wrote: post #86

It’s not the “it’ll build websites” part that worries me, it’s the “it’ll browse the web for people” part. When it starts doing that the relevancy of interactivity and design on the web starts plummeting as less and less humans will use it.

Elaborate, please. This is a new take to me.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#95

Post by monkeynotes »

JohnFen wrote: post #80
monkeynotes wrote: post #76

I see posts like this comparing past attempts, and in this article even 1990s Homestead, and I immediately think this person does not get it. Additionally all the statements that follow along the lines of "GPT today has a hard time with xyz" are all problematic too. Today is not tomorrow, and what it can do tomorrow is what we should be talking about. The fact is in just 3 months we've gone from fairly basic code rev…

> Jobs are going to be lost, it's a fact. Even if it's just that junior who was learning code reviews and supporting basic development, that job will be around for maybe a year or two at the rate we are moving. And how is that not a disaster for those who are out of work?

I don't know. It sounds like a rather substantial problem for those affected.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#96

Post by ibn_khaldun »

This is an exciting time, but also topically exhausting. I can see how past generations of technological change may have taken being in the midst of it all for granted in between the hype and the volley of takes for and against the latest groundbreaking innovation of the time.

Side note: I’m looking forward to a viable OpenAI competitor to come along and introduce their own chatbot…right now all of the speculation in the LLM area of AI are concentrated to the work of one company…what else can be out there?

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#97

Post by rpastuszak »

TylerE wrote: post #88
rpastuszak wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does that really hold water when some days half the front page is reposts from years ago? Hardly "news" either

I struggled to find a better way to express what I meant tbf. I want to avoid making general statements re the discourse here, so I try to respond with a specific comment in mind (e.g. the joke above). Otherwise it's just more of the same (depressing) noise.

I'm looking for alternatives, but the best I have at the moment is chatting with random people via my Calendly.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#98

Post by monkeynotes »

badRNG wrote: post #84
monkeynotes wrote: post #76

I see posts like this comparing past attempts, and in this article even 1990s Homestead, and I immediately think this person does not get it. Additionally all the statements that follow along the lines of "GPT today has a hard time with xyz" are all problematic too. Today is not tomorrow, and what it can do tomorrow is what we should be talking about. The fact is in just 3 months we've gone from fairly basic code rev…

> This is wildly different technology. Talking about what GPT can do today and landing at "it's not good enough" is also missing the point, we are nowhere near the limits of this tech and it's evolving so fast that these assessments are not insightful in the slightest. Just as often with AI's detractors who claim that it "merely" predicts the next word, I have to wonder if those making these grandiose claims about th…

> I have to wonder if those making these grandiose claims about the near future of AI have actually used GPT-4 and its predecessors in their work

I have used GPT-3 a fair bit, and used GPT-4 today. The differences are impressive, scary impressive so far. I am basing my `GPT(n+1)` observation on the rapid rate the tech is filling in holes that previous detractors pointed out.

The differences in code reviews is amazing. In GPT-3 it basically explained the method and said it looked good, "add some comments" was its only suggestion. GPT-4 on the other hand gave a code snippet to explain why JS "await" was unnecessary, suggested better variable names, and suggested moving some imports to a more simple file structure to reduce verbose import paths.

I think that's a beyond expectations improvement, it's so impressive it beats out the humans who reviewed the code and we implemented one of the suggestions.

If GPT-4 had ingested the entire code-base code reviews would easily be automated, humans would still do their passes but as a co-worker GPT would be invaluable. It would find swaths of missed efficiencies, fix slow SQL queries, look for testing gaps, and perhaps even assist in refactoring.

Personally I think we are underestimating the potential, I feel like we are where the world was in 1990 looking at the emerging internet. So many people underestimated the impact of the internet, many technology writers said it was hyperbole, couldn't replace bricks and mortar stores, email was never going to be for everyone, and so on. All of it wrong, profoundly missing the potential.

This stuff is beating out expectations at every release and I think that is reason enough to take it seriously and be much more considered when downplaying the hype.

As for junior devs, we don't hire IC1 for the same reasons you outlined. However, small studios do because they are cheap and serve a purpose where it's just WordPress maintenance and HTML POCs. Those jobs will disappear.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#99

Post by ofcourseyoudo »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #90
Arainach wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a variety of differences. Frontend development involves a large number of fuzzy human bits that are constantly moving underneath you. Yes, your backend dependencies can change and you may need to update an API version, but in frontend you have browsers, screen readers, frameworks, and all sorts of massive icebergs largely outside of your control constantly moving. In the backend, you probably have a languag…

Brilliant, sounds even less automatable than what I assumed.

I mean if one day AI can meet with the client instead of me....

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#100

Post by ofcourseyoudo »

rpastuszak wrote: post #66
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 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…

Probably about as hard as it is to find a more original phrase than "touch some grass"? Or are you fighting low effort with low effort?
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