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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#381

Post by stryan »

alwillis wrote: post #311
fartfeatures wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make the same argument about the printing press. Some people like forming the letters by hand, others enjoy actually writing.

Actually, the invention of the printing press in 1450 created a similar disruption, economic panic and institutional fear similar to what we're experiencing now: For centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat. Job Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for ba…

I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions.

I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argument, but considering everyone in this thread is a lot closer to being a scribe than a printing press owner, I'm surprised there's less sympathy.

Re: Web development is fun again

#382

Post by cmwelsh »

jimbokun wrote: post #376
jtbayly wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I was never particularly good at coding, either. Pairings with Gemini to finally figure out how to decompile an old Java app so I can make little changes to my user profile and some action files? That was fun! And I was never going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own. I had tried!

Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that.

> Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that.

To each their own! I think the market for folks who understand their own problems is exploding! It’s free money.

Re: Web development is fun again

#383

Post by jtbayly »

jimbokun wrote: post #376
jtbayly wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And I was never particularly good at coding, either. Pairings with Gemini to finally figure out how to decompile an old Java app so I can make little changes to my user profile and some action files? That was fun! And I was never going to be able to figure out how to do it on my own. I had tried!

Fewer things sound less interesting to me than that.

Fair enough. But that particular could be anything that has been bothering you but you didn’t have the time or expertise to fix yourself.

I wanted that fixed, and I had given up on ever seeing it fixed. Suddenly, in only two hours, I had it fixed. And I learned a lot in the process, too!

Re: Web development is fun again

#384

Post by koakuma-chan »

int_19h wrote: post #368
koakuma-chan wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they? I assume you are talking about PHP, which is not that kind of framework, because you would still have to write JavaScript. It lacks type safety too.

I'm talking about stuff like GWT from 2006.

Wow, I had no idea that existed. It looks like it is a Java library that abstracts over the web, and generates JavaScript under the hood? I never touched GWT, but it does sound like there would be issues if you wanted to do something that's not supported by the framework. But still, I don't think this is the same as modern full stack frameworks.

Re: Web development is fun again

#385

Post by phil21 »

jimbokun wrote: post #373
lmorchard wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you consider fun isn't universal. Some folks don't want to just tinker for half an hour, some folks enjoy getting a particular result that meets specific goals. Some folks don't find the mechanics of putting lines of code together as fun as what the code does when it runs. That might sound like paid work to you, but it can be gratifying for not-you.

The difference is whether or not you find computers interesting and enjoy understanding how they work. For the people who just want to solve some problem unrelated to computers but require a computer for some part of the task, yes AI would be more “fun”.

I don’t find this to be true. I enjoy computers quite a bit. I enjoy the hardware, scaling problems, theory behind things, operating systems, networking, etc.

Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot.

I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the result I desire. Maybe that’s creating a service for friends to use, maybe it’s a personal IT project, maybe it’s having commercial quality WiFi at home everyone is amazed at when they visit, etc. Sometimes - even often - it’s the understanding that leads to pride in craftsmanship.

But programming itself is just a chore for me to get done in service of whatever final outcome I’m attempting to achieve. Could be delivering bits on the internet for work, or automating OS installs to look at the 50 racks of servers humming away with cable porn level work done in the cabinets.

I never enjoyed messing around with HTML at that much in the 90s. But I was motivated to learn it just enough to achieve the cool ideas I could come up with as a teenager and share them with my friends.

I can appreciate clean maintainable code, which is the only real reason LLMs don’t scratch the itch as much as you’d expect for someone like me.

Re: Web development is fun again

#386

Post by freedomben »

apitman wrote: post #306
freedomben wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just fun in a different way now. I've long had dozens of ideas for things I wanted to build, and never enough time to really even build one of them. Over the last few months, I've been able to crank out several of these projects to satisfactory results. The code is not a beautiful work of art like I would prefer it to be, and the fun part is no longer the actual code and working in the code base like it used to…

I use LLMs for code at work, but I've been a bit hesitant to dive in for side projects because I'm worried about the cost. Is it necessary to pay $200/mo to actually ship things or will $20/mo do it? Obviously I could just try it myself and see how far I get bit I'm curious to hear from someone a bit further down the path.

Depending on how much you use, you can pay API prices and get pretty far for 20 bucks a month or less. If you exhaust that, surprisingly, I recommend getting Gemini with the Google AI pro subscription. You can use a lot of the Gemini CLi for that

Re: Web development is fun again

#388

Post by esperent »

yason wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #7

Something 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…

I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…

Something happened to me a few years ago. I used to write code professionally and contribute to open source a lot. I was freelancing on other people's projects and contributing to mature projects so I was doing hard work, mostly at a low level (I mean algorithms, performance fixes, small new features, rather than high level project architecture).

I was working on an open source contribution for a few days. Something that I struggled with, but I enjoyed the challenge and learned a lot from it.

As it happened someone else submitted a PR fixing the same issue around the same time. I wasn't bothered if mine got picked or not, it happens. But I remember looking at how similar both of our contributions were and feeling like we were using our brains as computers, just crunching algorithms and pumping in knowledge to create some technical code that was (at the time) impossible for a computer to create. This stayed with me for a while and I decided that doing this technical algorithm crunching wasn't the best use of my human brain. I was making myself interchangeable with all the other human (and now AI) code crunchers. I should move on to a higher level, either architectural or management.

This was a big deal for me because I did love (and still do) deeply understanding algorithms and mathematics.

I was extremely fortunate with timing as it was just around one year before AI coding became mainstream but early enough that it wasn't a factor in this shift. Now an AI could probably churn out a decent version of that algorithm in a few minutes.

I did move on to open my own business with my partner and haven't written much code in a few years. And when I do now I appreciate that I can focus on the high level stuff and create something that my business needs in a few hours without exhausting myself on low level algorithm crunching.

This isn't meant to put down the enjoyment of writing code for code's sake. I still do appreciate well written code and the craft that goes into it. I'm just documenting my personal shift and noting that enjoyment can be found on both sides.

Re: Web development is fun again

#389

Post by dpkirchner »

jimbokun wrote: post #378
TuringTest wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. Sometimes they joy is in discovering what problem you are solving, by exploring the space of possibilities on features and workflows on a domain. For that, having elegant and simple software is not needed; getting features fast to try out how they work is the basis of the pleasure, so having to write every detail by hand reduces the fun.

Sounds like someone who enjoys listening to music but not composing or performing music.

Or maybe someone DJing instead of creating music from scratch.

Re: Web development is fun again

#390

Post by robofanatic »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #80
simonw wrote: post #7

Something 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…

It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.

> Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done.

These days I use display: flex; so much that I wish the initial value of the display property in CSS should be flex instead of inline;

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