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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#461

Post by wesammikhail »

sublinear wrote: post #143
wackget wrote: post #123

> 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… I remember when the biggest challenge was IE6 compatibility. You only have those things if you choose to use them. I've been building websites for 25 years. I use the same core technologies today that I did when I started. Sure, I make us…

It's so weird to see this take repeated over and over. I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? The only part where I agree is that you don't need PHP or server-side rendering in general.

> I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web?

Can I ask, what classifies as large scale project for the web?

I previously created and exited a trading platform that did billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do. So does that qualify?

If so, I can tell you that I did it with PHP and no JS frameworks. Hosted on a couple of VPS servers from digital ocean. From idea to execution to exit in ~9 months.

You know what the weird part is? I see your take repeated over and over by "shovel peddlers" and grifters. And every single time it comes with 0 substance or merit.

Re: Web development is fun again

#462

Post by willtemperley »

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…

> You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more.

Yes. That used to require difficult decision making: “Can I do this and how long will it take?” was a significant cognitive load and source of stress. This was especially true when it became clear something was going to take days not hours, having expended a lot of effort already.

Even more frustrating was having to implement hacks due to time constraints when I knew a couple more hours would obviate that need.

Now I know within a couple of minutes if something is feasible or not and decision fatigue is much lower.

Re: Web development is fun again

#463

Post by wesammikhail »

jszymborski wrote: post #20

I remember those times, and it was a lot of fun, but there's really nothing stopping you from running a LAMP stack today, writing PHP without frameworks and with manual SQL queries. In fact, it's a lot more fun for me to approach this today. Modern PHP is a joy. MariaSQL is very much MySQL (and switching to Postgres isn't exactly a bump in complexity). It's way easier to write code that won't get injected. If you wan…

I still write vanilla PHP with SQL queries. And with all the modern PHP features, things have never been faster or more joyful to work with.

I honestly feel bad for people who fall victims to complexity. It burns you out when all you need is to keep things simple and fun. Life is too short for anything else.

Re: Web development is fun again

#464

Post by anhner »

kmoser wrote: post #317
anhner wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and what are those strengths, if you don't mind me asking?

- Providing boilerplate/template code for common use cases - Explaining what code is doing and how it works - Refactoring/updating code when given specific requirements - Providing alternative ways of doing things that you might not have thought of yourself YMMV; every project is different so you might not have occasion to use all of these at the same time.

I appreciate your reply. A lot of people just say how wonderful and revolutionary LLMs are, but when asked for more concrete stuff they give vague answers or even worse, berate you for being skeptical/accuse you of being a luddite.

Your list gives me a starting point and I'm sure it can even be expanded. I do use LLMs the way you suggested and find them pretty useful most of the time - in chat mode. However, when using them in "agent mode" I find them far less useful.

Re: Web development is fun again

#465

Post by inferiorhuman »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #417
mbirth wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that after you’ve googled it for ½ hour, you’ve learned something. If you ask an LLM to do it for you, you’re none the wiser.

You can study the LLM output. In the “before times” I’d just clone a random git repo, use a template, or copy and paste stuff together to get the initial version working.

Studying gibberish doesn't teach you anything. If you were cargo culting shit before AI you weren't learning anything then either.

Re: Web development is fun again

#466

Post by codebolt »

po84 wrote: post #42
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…

This matches my experience. A recent anecdote: I took time during a holiday to write an Obsidian plugin 4 years ago to scratch a personal itch as it were. I promptly forgot most of the detail, the Obsidian plugin API and ecosystem have naturally changed since then, and Typescript isn't in my day-to-day lingo. I've been collecting ideas for new plugins since then while dreading the investment needed to get back up to…

Another anecdote: I built my first Android app in less than a dozen hours over the holiday, tailored for a specific need I have. I do have many years of experience with Java, C# and JS (Angular), but have never coded anything for mobile. Gemini helped me figure out how to set up a Kotlin app with a reasonable architecture (Hilt for dependency injection, etc). It also helped me find Material3 components and set up the UI in a way that looks not too bad, especially considering my lack of design skills. The whole project was a real joy to do, and I have a couple of more ideas that I'm going to implement over the coming months.

As a father of three with a busy life, this would've simply been impossible a couple of years ago.

Re: Web development is fun again

#467

Post by michaelsalim »

christophilus wrote: post #236

My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job. It’s pure drudgery, and is mentally taxing. Unless you’re vibe coding, you’re now doing a lot of code review. It’s almost all you’re doing outside of the high-level planning and guidance (which is enjoyable). I’ve settled on reviewing the security boundaries and areas that could affect data leaks / invalid access. And pretty much scan…

For most of my AI uses, I already have an implementation in mind. The prompt is small enough that most of the time, the agent would get it 90% there. In a way, it's basically an advanced autocomplete.

I think this is quite nice cause it doesn't feel like code review. It's more of a: did it do it? Yes? Great. Somewhat? Good enough, i can work from there. And when it doesn't work, I just scrap that and re-prompt or implement it manually.

But I do agree with what you say. When someone uses AI without making the code their own, it's a nightmare. I've had to review some PRs where I feel like I'm prompting AI rather than an engineer. I did wonder if they simply put my reviews directly to some agent...

Re: Web development is fun again

#468

Post by vanviegen »

wesammikhail wrote: post #461
sublinear wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird to see this take repeated over and over. I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? The only part where I agree is that you don't need PHP or server-side rendering in general.

> I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? Can I ask, what classifies as large scale project for the web? I previously created and exited a trading platform that did billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do. So does that qualify? If so, I can tell you tha…

> I can tell you that I did it

The 'I' here reveals that this is indeed not a large scale project, though perhaps impressive. When working on a piece of software with tens of people, using more tooling really does makes sense.

Re: Web development is fun again

#469

Post by misiek08 »

flaburgan wrote: post #246

Either the projects he's working on are side projects, and in that case I don't see why he would need to use the complex pipelines, just Vanilla JS and PHP still work super fine, even better nowadays actually, or the projects are professional ones and then to ship code written by AI is extremely dangerous and he should have resources (time and people) to do things properly without AI. So, I'm clearly not convinced.

Maybe it is „very” professional, so he is part of one of hundreds of teams and he is creating micro parts of big system and with such setup he is easily hiding in ocean of very low performing people. In many big setups there are so-called microservices that in reality are picoservices doing function of 1-2 method and 1-2 tables in db.

Either way - the setup looks nice and is one of very few that really shows how to make things work. A lot of people say about 5-10x improvements not showing even the prompts, because probably they made some 2 model CRUD that probably can be already made with 20 lines of code in Django.

Re: Web development is fun again

#470

Post by lelanthran »

wcarss wrote: post #299
lelanthran wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas. What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have…

That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing pla…

> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual.

I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay!

IOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it).

You're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners.

> How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less?

The cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital.

You're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero.

There's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers.

The market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job.

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