Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just as a personal data point, are you a developer? Do you use AI?
Yes and yes.
And you find yourself less productive?
Web development is fun again
131–140 of 658 posts
Re: Web development is fun again
#132Re: Web development is fun again
#133Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
Yes! I’ve seen this myself, folks moving back into development after years or decades.
They're not moving back into development. They're adopting a new approach of producing software, which has nothing to do with the work that software developers do. It's likely that they "left" the field because they were more interested in other roles, which is fine.
So now that we have tools that promise to offload the work a software developer does, there are more people interested in simply producing software, and skipping all of that "busy work".
The idea that this is the same as software development is akin to thinking that assembling IKEA furniture makes you a carpenter.
Re: Web development is fun again
#134Re: Web development is fun again
#135Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
> AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more.
That fits my experience with a chrome extension I created. Instead of having to read the docs, find example projects, etc, I was able to get a working version in less than a hour.
Re: Web development is fun again
#136You were never able to stop using the techniques you learned, and you were always able to keep up with minimal effort - you didn’t need to learn any frameworks.
I’m glad you’re having fun, but you didn’t need AI to overcome some laborious hurdle. The only hurdle that existed was your own laziness.
Re: Web development is fun again
#137It's amazing to be able to try a bunch of ideas with very minimal cost. That being said, AI code assistants don't have eyeballs and they often make things that don't look very good. Craft, polish and judgement still matter.
I find they can make some things look objectively "good", but they just look generic and it feels very easy to spot a site that was made without the vision, polish and judgement.
You can get LLMs to create some truly unique sites, but it takes a lot more work than a few prompts.
Re: Web development is fun again
#138Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
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Could you please stop posting cynical and/or curmudgeonly comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, and it destroys the intended spirit of this site.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Re: Web development is fun again
#139Re: Web development is fun again
#140> On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… LLMs are successful in webdev because of unnecessary frameworks being piled on top of each other more in the name of job security than technical necessity.
You're completely free to write software targeting the browser platform without a framework, build pipeline, and bundler. Those things exist for a reason though and running a large project without them quickly runs into worse problems.
Those things exist because of eachother. If you’re not using a reactive framework, you probably have no need for a bundler and if you’re not using a bundler, you probably have no need for a build pipeline.