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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

491–500 of 658 posts

Re: Web development is fun again

#491

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I accept there are productivity gains, but it's hard to take "10x" seriously. It's such a tired trope. Is no one humble enough to be a meager 2.5x engineer?

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

I estimated that i was 1.2x when we only had tab completion models. 1.5x would be too modest. I've done plenty of ~6-8 hour tasks in ~1-2 hours using llms.

Re: Web development is fun again

#492

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If you static render, it won't be an interactive application. With React SSR you get the best of both: stream static HTML chunks immediately, and rehydrate with JS later, prioritizing components the user interacts with. It should load quicker compared to traditional React apps where the browser loads the HTML, then loads the JS bundle, and only then renders a loading skeleton while likely triggering more requests for…

> It should load quicker compared to traditional React apps where the browser loads the HTML, then loads the JS bundle, and only then renders a loading skeleton while likely triggering more requests for data. Then your JS bundle is broken. Promises exist. Modules exist. HTTP/2+ exists. You can load data while you are loading a small amount of JS required to render that data while you are loading other parts of your J…

You cannot load any data in a regular React application before you loaded both React and your React components that trigger the fetch.

If you use code splitting, your initial bundle size can be smaller, yes. That's about it.

I guess in theory you can hack together static loading skeletons that you then remove when React loaded your initial bundle, but that's certainly far from a common approach. By that standard, the vast majority of JS bundles would be "broken".

Re: Web development is fun again

#493
post #474

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Or, given that OP is presumably a developer who just doesn't focus fully on front end code they could skip straight to checking MDN for "center div" and get a How To article ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/How_to/Layo... ) as the first result without relying on spicy autocomplete. Given how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something l…

LLMs work very well for a variety of software tasks — we have lots of experience around the industry now. If you haven’t been convinced by pure argument in 2026 then you probably won’t be. But the great thing is you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. This isn’t crypto, where everyone using it has a stake in its success. You can just try it, or not.

That's a lot of words to say "trust me bruh" which is kind of poetic given that's the entire model (no pun intended) that LLMs work on.

Re: Web development is fun again

#494

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Don't worry, it's an LLM that wrote it based on the patterns in the text, e.g. "Starting a new project once felt insurmountable. Now, it feels realistic again."

That is a normal, run of the mill sentence.

Yes, for an LLM. The good thing about LLMs is that they can infer patterns. The bad thing about LLMs is that they infer patterns. The patterns change a bit over time, but the overuse of certain language patterns remains a constant.

One could argue that some humans write that way, but ultimately it does not matter if the text was generated by an LLM, reworded by a human in a semi-closed loop or organically produced by human. The patterns indicate that the text is just a regurgitation of buzzwords and it's even worse if an LLM-like text was produced organically.

Re: Web development is fun again

#495

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Just you wait until the powers that be take cars away from us! What absolute FOOLS you all are to shape your lives around something that could be taken away from us at any time! How are you going to get to work when gas stations magically disappear off the face of the planet? I ride a horse to work, and y'all are idiots for developing a dependency on cars. Next thing you're gonna tell me is we're going to go to war f…

I mean, they're taking away parts of cars at the moment. You gotta pay monthly to unlock features your car already has.

Just like the comment you replied to this is an argument against subscription model "thing" as a service business models, not against cars.

Re: Web development is fun again

#496
post #140

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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.

And also a build pipeline doesn't have to be difficult to write. You can do it in like 50 lines of code and esbuild. And then you get to bundle your CSS, use React or whatever, Typescript, etc.

Re: Web development is fun again

#497
post #415

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For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI.

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.

>> The difference is that after you’ve googled it for ½ hour, you’ve learned something.

I've been programming for 15+ years, and I think I've forgotten the overwhelming majority of the things I've googled. Hell, I can barely remember the things I've googled yesterday.

Re: Web development is fun again

#498
post #343

Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA. If you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love.

So you’re skipping any sort of a build pipeline? You’re not going to bundle, so no code minification? You’re going to skip tests ? And everyone who uses these things just does them to “feel grown up” and not for any particular benefit or purpose beyond that?

You can use esbuild to build your entire project with a single command. Node has a built in test runner. You only need the complexity because you're convinced you need it.

Re: Web development is fun again

#499
post #265

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Sorry friend, if you can’t identify the important differences between a compiler and an LLM, either intentionally or unintentionally (I can’t tell), then I must question the value of whatever you have to say on the topic.

The important difference is the reduction in boilerplate, which allows programs to be written with (often) significantly less code. Hence the time savings (and fun) spoken of in the original article. This isn't really a new phenomenon. Languages have been adding things like arrays and maps as builtins to reduce the boilerplate required around them. The modern languages of which we speak take that same idea to a whole…

No, when we write code it has a an absolute and specific meaning to the compiler. When we write words to an LLM they are written in a non-specific informal language (usually English) and processed non-deterministically too. This is an incredibly important distinction that makes coding, and asking the LLM to code, two completely different ball games. One is formal, one is not.

And yes, this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Re: Web development is fun again

#500

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> "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.

I didn't "create" the pissing contest, I merely pointed it out in someone else's drivel.

And of course, these labels are important to me for (precise) language defines the boundaries of my world; coder vs. non-coder, medico vs. quack, writer vs. analphabet, truth vs. lie, etc. Elementary.

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