Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 658 posts

Re: Web development is fun again

#391

Post by camel_Snake »

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.

I have a feeling you are using SOTA models at work and aren't used to just how cheap the non-Anthropic/Google/OAI options are these days. GLM's coding subscription is like $6/month if you buy a full year.

Re: Web development is fun again

#393

Post by ch4s3 »

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…

For me it automates a lot of the boilerplate that usually bogs me down on side projects. I cal spin up all of the stuff I hate doing quickly and then fiddle with the interesting parts inside of a working scaffold of code. I recently did this with an elixir wrapper around some Erlang OTP code o wanted to use. Figuring out how to clue together all of the parts that touched the Erlang and tracing all of the arguments through old OTP code would have absolutely stopped me from bothering with this in the past. Instead I’m having fun playing with the interface of my tool in ways that matter for my use case.

Re: Web development is fun again

#394

Post by int_19h »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #384
int_19h wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I remember correctly, it was the first whatever-to-JS transpiler. But it opened the floodgates and "do everything in one language, bridge the gap transparently" has been tried several times since then.

And even before that, actually! Before web apps were even a thing, we had DCOM and CORBA and some other similar but less-known frameworks that tried to make OOP in general network-transparent. It worked in principle - you could have distributed object graphs in pretty much arbitrary configurations, going back and forth as needed to capture the semantics. It failed in practice because every time you have a network gap you get a slew of potential issues that just don't exist without it (simply put, your connection and/or the other party may suddenly go away).

FWIW I'm not saying that single-language specifically is a bad idea. It's specifically the notion that you can treat a distributed app as a monolithic thing without clearly marked internal boundaries where the network gap is, that fails in real world. But if you expose the gap then you still need to deal with impedance mismatch - e.g. nice your object oriented API no longer works because the object graph can't span the gap, so you need a more procedural (read: REST-style) API with serialization etc.

So, this is the point where you basically want a language designed from grounds up with message passing in mind. Blazor, but for something like Erlang or Elixir, perhaps?

Re: Web development is fun again

#395

Post by tjr »

phil21 wrote: post #385
jimbokun wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I really enjoy in programming is algorithms and bit-twiddling and stuff that might be in Knuth or HAKMEM or whatever. That’s fun. I like writing Lisp especially, and doing cool, elegant functional programs.

I don’t enjoy boilerplate. I don’t necessarily enjoy all of the error checking and polishing and minutia in turning algorithms into shippable products.

I find AI can be immensely helpful in making real things for people to use, but I still enjoy doing what I find fun by hand.

Re: Web development is fun again

#396

Post by ch4s3 »

spankibalt wrote: post #352
blitz_skull wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 1000x! I had a bit of an identity crisis with AI first landed and started producing good code. “If I’m not the man who can type quickly, accurately, and build working programs… WHO AM I?” But as you pointed out, I quickly realized I was never that guy. I was the guy who made problems go away, usually with code. Now I can make so many problems go away, it feels like cheating. As it turns out, writing code isn’t s…

[flagged]

Anyone who can’t read Proust and write a compelling essay about the themes is illiterate!

Re: Web development is fun again

#397

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Well the lesson is that for all of us who invested a lot of time and effort to become good software developers the value of our skill set is now near zero.

Re: Web development is fun again

#398

Post by [deleted] »

lmorchard wrote: post #224
yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Web development is fun again

#399

Post by nicoburns »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #144
llmslave2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 2.5x is absurd. If they said 1.5x I might believe them.

I'm building an AI agent for Godot, and in paid user testing we found the median speed up time to complete a variety of tasks[0] was 2x. This number was closer to 10x for less experienced engineers [0] tasks included making games from scratch and resolving bugs we put into template projects. There's no perfect tasks to test on, but this seemed sufficient

Have you evaluated the maintainability of the generated code? Becuause that could of course start to count in the negative direction over time.

Some of the AI generated I've seen has been decent quality, but almost all of it is much more verbose or just greater in quantity than hand written code is/would be. And that's almost always what you don't want for maintenance...

Re: Web development is fun again

#400

Post by Izkata »

duggan wrote: post #147
llmslave2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely searching "centre a div" takes less time than prompting and waiting for a response...

Search “centre a div” in Google Wade through ads Skim a treatise on the history of centering content Skim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow Find some code on the page Try to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout Realize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind Keep searching Try some stuff until it works Or… Ask LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on t…

> Search “centre a div” in Google

Aaand done. Very first result was a blog post showing all the different ways to do it, old and new, without any preamble.

Post reply on HN