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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#541

Post by oblio »

visarga wrote: post #478
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.

Why train to pedal fast when we already got motorcycles? You are preparing for yesterday's needs. There will never be a time when we need to solve this manually like it's 2019. Even in 2019 we would probably have used Google, solving was already based on extensive web resources. While in 1995 you would really have needed to do it manually. Instead of manual coding training your time is better invested in learning to…

> Why train to pedal fast when we already got motorcycles? You are preparing for yesterday's needs.

This is funny in the sense that in properly built urban environment bycicles are one of the best ways to add some physical activity in a time constrained schedule, as we're discovering.

Re: Web development is fun again

#542

Post by inferiorhuman »

oblio wrote: post #537
inferiorhuman wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not gibberish. More than that, LLMs frequently write comments (some are fluff but some explain the reasoning quite well), variables are frequently named better than cdx, hgv, ti, stuff like that, plus looking at the reasoning while it's happening provides more clues. Also, it's actually fun watching LLMs debug. Since they're reasonably similar to devs while investigating, but they have a data bank the size of th…

  they have a data bank the size of the internet so they can
  pull hints that sometimes surprise even experienced devs.
That's a polite way of phrasing "they've stolen a mountain of information and overwhelmed resources that humans would use to other find answers." I just discovered another victim: the Renesas forums. Cloudflare is blocking me from accessing the site completely, the only site I've ever had this happen to. But I'm glad you're able to have your fun.

  it might turn out the balance is something like 25% handmade - 75% LLM made.
Doubtful. As the arms race continues AI DDoS bots will have less and less recent "training" material. Not a day goes by that I don't discover another site employing anti-AI bot software.

Re: Web development is fun again

#543

Post by inferiorhuman »

ben_w wrote: post #517
inferiorhuman wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Necessarily, LLM output that works isn't gibberish. The code that LLM outputs, has worked well enough to learn from since the initial launch of ChatGPT. This even though back then you might have to repeatedly say "continue" because it would stop in the middle of writing a function.

  Necessarily, LLM output that works isn't gibberish.
Hardly. Poorly conjured up code can still work.

Re: Web development is fun again

#544

Post by ChicagoDave »

lelanthran wrote: post #487
ChicagoDave wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It’s not just my metrics. It’s because ALL the gaps in my engineering knowledge are closed with GenAI.

Well except for graphic design.

But all the complexity of web development is erased. AWS development and deployment complexity and time requirements are erased. Debugging problem time is erased. Refactoring times are squashed. Assessing gaps time requirements are squashed.

This is why I say 40x. It’s not what I knew. It’s that I can have GenAI do all the things I don’t know.

Re: Web development is fun again

#545

Post by ben_w »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #543
ben_w wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Necessarily, LLM output that works isn't gibberish. The code that LLM outputs, has worked well enough to learn from since the initial launch of ChatGPT. This even though back then you might have to repeatedly say "continue" because it would stop in the middle of writing a function.

Necessarily, LLM output that works isn't gibberish. Hardly. Poorly conjured up code can still work.

"Gibberish" code is necessary code which doesn't work. Even in the broader use of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibberish

Especially in this context, if a mystery box solves a problem for me, I can look at the solution and learn something from that solution, c.f. how paper was inspired by watching wasps at work.

Even the abject failures can be interesting, though I find them more helpful for forcing my writing to be easier to understand.

Re: Web development is fun again

#546

Post by philipwhiuk »

visarga wrote: post #478
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.

Why train to pedal fast when we already got motorcycles? You are preparing for yesterday's needs. There will never be a time when we need to solve this manually like it's 2019. Even in 2019 we would probably have used Google, solving was already based on extensive web resources. While in 1995 you would really have needed to do it manually. Instead of manual coding training your time is better invested in learning to…

> Instead of manual coding training your time is better invested in learning to channel coding agents

All channelling is broken when the model is updated. Being knowledgeable about the foibles of a particular model release is a waste of time.

> how to test code to our satisfaction

Sure testing has value.

> how to know if what AI did was any good

This is what code review is for.

> Testing without manual review, because manual review is just vibes

Calling manual review vibes is utterly ridiculous. It's not vibes to point out an O(n!) structure. It's not vibes to point out missing cases.

If your code reviews are 'vibes', you're bad at code review

> If we treat AI-generated code like human code that requires a line-by-line peer review, we are just walking the motorcycle.

To fix the analogy you're not reviewing the motorcycle, you're reviewing the motorcycle's behaviour during the lap.

Re: Web development is fun again

#547

Post by wcarss »

lelanthran wrote: post #470
wcarss wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case.

My Glad example was off the cuff but it still feels apt to me for the case I mean: the barrier for an existing plastic product producer who doesn't already to also produce bags is likely very low, but it's still non zero, while the barrier for a random person is quite high. I feel vibe coding made individual projects much cheaper (sometimes zero) for decent programmers, but it hasn't made my mom start producing programming projects -- the barrier still seems quite high for non technical people.

Re: Web development is fun again

#548

Post by normie3000 »

> 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.

I know which I'd choose. In my experience of the IE6 era, tooling was atrocious, and most (all?) cross-browser testing was manual. Varying box models and no devtools? Give me npm framework churn and layers of transpilation any day.

Re: Web development is fun again

#549

Post by ben_w »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #542
oblio wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not gibberish. More than that, LLMs frequently write comments (some are fluff but some explain the reasoning quite well), variables are frequently named better than cdx, hgv, ti, stuff like that, plus looking at the reasoning while it's happening provides more clues. Also, it's actually fun watching LLMs debug. Since they're reasonably similar to devs while investigating, but they have a data bank the size of th…

they have a data bank the size of the internet so they can pull hints that sometimes surprise even experienced devs. That's a polite way of phrasing "they've stolen a mountain of information and overwhelmed resources that humans would use to other find answers." I just discovered another victim: the Renesas forums. Cloudflare is blocking me from accessing the site completely, the only site I've ever had this happen t…

> they've stolen a mountain of information

In law, training is not itself theft. Pirating books for any reason including training is still a copyright violation, but the judges ruled specifically that the training on data lawfully obtained was not itself an offence.

Cloudfare has to block so many more bots now precisely because crawling the public, free-to-everyone, internet is legally not theft. (And indeed would struggle to be, given all search engines have for a long time been doing just that).

> As the arms race continues AI DDoS bots will have less and less recent "training" material

My experience as a human is that humans keep re-inventing the wheel, and if they instead re-read the solutions from even just 5 years earlier (or 10, or 15, or 20…) we'd have simpler code and tools that did all we wanted already.

For example, "making a UI" peaked sometime between the late 90s and mid 2010s with WYSIWYG tools like Visual Basic (and the mac equivalent now known as Xojo) and Dreamweaver, and then in the final part of that a few good years where Interface Builder finally wasn't sucking on Xcode. And then everyone on the web went for React and Apple made SwiftUI with a preview mode that kept crashing.

If LLMs had come before reactive UI, we'd have non-reactive alternatives that would probably suck less than all the weird things I keep seeing from reactive UIs.

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