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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#481

Post by timeon »

> I remember when PHP 4 was a thing. jQuery was new and shiny. Sites were built with tables, not divs. Dreamweaver felt like a life hack. Designs were sliced in Photoshop. Databases lived in phpMyAdmin.

> It probably didn’t feel like it at the time, but looking back, those were simpler days.

jQuery was bloat, there were others like MooTools. People idealize tables but it was not just grid, it was often used as hacks as well, like weird offsets, etc. Dreamweaver produced mess. Sliced designs? "This site is optimized for 800x600"

Not saying current state is good. I just find interesting how nostalgia can distort memories even in tech.

Re: Web development is fun again

#482

Post by mirsadm »

lelanthran wrote: post #225
101008 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. 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 de…

> 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…

You're overestimating people's willingness to write code even if they don't have to do it. Most people just don't want to do it even if AI made is easy to do so. Not sure who you're talking to but most people I know that aren't programmers have zero interest in writing their own software even if they could do it using prompts only.

Re: Web development is fun again

#483

Post by timeon »

vanviegen wrote: post #468
wesammikhail wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

'I' here reveals that it is on topic in context of posted article. Which is purpose of this thread.

Sorry I do not want to sound like a dick re-stating the obvious but threads often are going off the rails and I find it bit absurd.

Re: Web development is fun again

#484

Post by threeducks »

vntok wrote: post #234
master_crab wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires hardware in the tens of thousands of dollars (if we want the tokens spit out at a reasonable pace). Maybe in 3-5 years this will work on consumer hardware at speed, but not in the immediate term.

$2000 will get you 30~50 tokens/s on perfectly usable quantization levels (Q4-Q5), taken from any one among the top 5 best open weights MoE models. That's not half bad and will only get better!

Could you explain how? I can't seem to figure it out.

DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has 37B active parameters, GLM-4.7 and Kimi K2 have 32B active parameters.

Lets say we are dealing with Q4_K_S quantization for roughly half the size, we still need to move 16 GB 30 times per second, which requires a memory bandwidth of 480 GB/s, or maybe half that if speculative decoding works really well.

Anything GPU-based won't work for that speed, because PCIe 5 provides only 64 GB/s and $2000 can not afford enough VRAM (~256GB) for a full model.

That leaves CPU-based systems with high memory bandwidth. DDR5 would work (somewhere around 300 GB/s with 8x 4800MHz modules), but that would cost about twice as much for just the RAM alone, disregarding the rest of the system.

Can you get enough memory bandwidth out of DDR4 somehow?

Re: Web development is fun again

#485

Post by framapotari »

spankibalt wrote: post #435
ragequittah wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine this same argument happening when people stopped using machine code and assembly en masse and started using FORTRAN or COBOL. You don't really know what you're doing unless you're spending the effort I spent!

> "I imagine this same argument happening when people stopped using machine code and assembly en masse and started using FORTRAN or COBOL." Yeah, certainly. But since this has nothing to do with my argument, which was an answer to the very existential question of a (postulated) non-coder , and not a comment on a forgotten pissing contest between coders , it's utterly irrelevant. :(

This is quite funny when you created the pissing contest between "coders" and "non-coders" in this thread. Those labels seem very important to you.

Re: Web development is fun again

#486

Post by framapotari »

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…

I find it interesting how you take your experience and generalize it by saying "you" instead of "I". This is how I read your post:

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

Reading it like this makes it obvious to me that what you find fun is not necessarily what other people find fun. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. Describing your experience and preferences as something more is where the water starts getting muddy.

Re: Web development is fun again

#487

Post by lelanthran »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #259
lelanthran wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude Code has turned me into a 40x productive developer without limitations. C'mon man! Even the 10x claims weren't holding up.

I have 41 years building software for Fortune 500 companies. 10x is a slam dunk for guys like me. 40x is because I’m divorced and bored.

Look, pre-LLM, I could churn out 600 lines of tested code into production per day.

If using my web app crud framework, I could produce a single simple crud webpage in a single day.

I could do more complex things in a single week (industrial sensors and controllers).

With LLMs, I don't deliver 6000 production code per day, I don't deliver 10 web apps per day and I don't deliver 10 different embedded projects 0or week.

I don't know what your personal pre-LLM metrics are, but with 41 years of experience I expect them to be close to mine.

I am skeptical that you can deliver 10x of what your previous metrics were, nevermind 40x.

What are your pre-LLM metrics?

Re: Web development is fun again

#488

Post by popalchemist »

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…

Some people build because they enjoy the mechanics. Others build because they want to use the end product. That camp will get from A to B much more easily with AI, because for them it was never about the craft. And that's more than OK.

Re: Web development is fun again

#489

Post by popalchemist »

arjie wrote: post #209
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…

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

Literally shipping a vide-coded feature as my baby sleeps, while reading this comment thread. It's the wild west again. I love it.

Re: Web development is fun again

#490

Post by fullstackchris »

solumunus wrote: post #141
agumonkey wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs) I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing…

Anything that can be done in 2 days now with an LLM was low hanging fruit to begin with.

I'll also argue that level of skill depends on what one can make in those two days... it's like a mirror. If you don't know what to ask for, it doesn't know what to produce
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