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Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

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Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#11

Post by cryo32 »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #4
iLoveOncall wrote: post #2

> JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand I'm sorry but that simply does not make any sense. How is increasing the breadth of your skills leading to a deskilling?

The phenomenon of bootcamp graduates who knew React but did not know JavaScript.

yes and now they get Claude to write React and don't know that or JavaScript.

When something goes wrong, no one understands anything.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#12

Post by sdevonoes »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

Most of software engineering is accidental complexity. Sharding, buffering, caching, load balancing, contention, async, functions, classes, recursion…

Big corporations behind LLMs are taking it all.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#13

Post by Filligree »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

To make the obvious counterargument, “then you shouldn’t be creating websites at all”.

I don’t actually believe this, but I know people who do. Some would add “shouldn’t be allowed to”.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#15

Post by customguy »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then?

> More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

That I agree with. The more the merrier, all else being the same. And if "AI" trickled into everything because of the undeniable improvements it leads to, the situation and most of the sentiments would be very different, I think.

But even then, people aren't entitled to the knowledge "created" by doing the work. If attribution and compensation were tackled in earnest, if you could only train on the materials of the people you pay to produce those materials, it might be much quicker and cheaper to just learn CSS.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#16

Post by reaperducer »

23david wrote: post #7

I think it's more likely to cause a lost Decade of people not going into CS or tech due to lack of entry-level jobs. Maybe next time there's a boom and the pendulum of the power dynamic between management and labor swings more towards the workers, tech workers will unionize or organize better. I think overall it will benefit the industry because these boom and bust cycles for employment are just not healthy.

I think it's more likely to cause a lost Decade of people not going into CS or tech due to lack of entry-level jobs.

That could be a good thing, or a bad thing.

Maybe it will push more people into medicine, science, art, or other worthwhile careers.

Or maybe they'll end up lawyers, SEO experts, or venture capitalists.

It could go either way.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#17

Post by gobdovan »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

It doesn't seem to me that the author is saying 'AI bad, abstraction bad, knowing browser quirks GOOD'. Looks to me like someone making a specific claim about a trend where having an easier time getting off the ground can lead to a lower ceiling.

I'd read it kind of like 'The man and the butterfly' story. Or the Kant passage about how doves might wish air didn't exist, without realising that friction is exactly what permits them to fly.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#18

Post by actionfromafar »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #3

> frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing I remember this period differently. The frontend work was mostly, sometimes solely, all about turning whatever monstrous PSD came from the designer’s sick mind into HTML, and getting shafted if t…

I think there might have been two overlapping periods, but it definitely started out as you said. What I wonder is, will AI increase frontend churn, or calm it down? (More churn would be, new frontends because of new frontend frameworks, AI accelerated, less churn would be, because AI is trained on what existed before)

I think I also reject the premise of the article, that frameworks caused frontends dev to de-skill. For sure, that happened to some extent. But it also caused a lot of frontend devs to be incredibly skilled in their chosen niche. (React for instance.)

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#19

Post by wongarsu »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #3

> frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing I remember this period differently. The frontend work was mostly, sometimes solely, all about turning whatever monstrous PSD came from the designer’s sick mind into HTML, and getting shafted if t…

And knowing the differences between various browsers meant negotiating whether the layout being 3px off on Internet Explorer was acceptable, or whether we should ship different CSS files for different browsers to fix this discrepancy

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#20

Post by Zababa »

The part on the Bauhaus movement is weird, and I'm not sure I agree about how the author thinks about users.

>What did previous generations of craftspeople do when everyday goods and buildings suddenly could be mass-produced by industrial processes? One reaction was to copy the style of old, and make the industry crank out widgets and buildings that at least looked like they were handcrafted.

Is this a reaction by craftspeople? I don't think it is, I think this was what industry people did?

>Countering this trend of historicism, an alternative approach was developed by the Bauhaus movement of the early 20th century. Instead of pitting factory workers against craftspeople, their stated goal was to have them work together, and redevelop the arts and crafts with industrial manufacturing processes in mind.

From what I understand the Bauhaus movement has/had a huge influence on modern architecture, which people tend to like less than traditional architecture [1]. It feels weird to have that followed by "Caring about quality and the user".

>The industrialization enabled lots of cheap plastic products, designed by people who didn’t take the time to think how they would be used and by whom – yet good industrial design is still a thing.

>And software like Wix and Next.js enabled the creation of lots of websites that load terribly slow and are not accessible – yet there are still practitioners of the front of the frontend out there.

I think the author really really really underestimates how important is it that something is "cheap". I personally like a lot having the option to use cheap and relatively good stuff, or pricier and better stuff, for most things.

This is a bit stretching the definition of "accessibility" but, I think in a way price should be thought as part of accessibility. If we consider that it's important that websites work well on slow networks, partially because not everywhere in the world has access to good network, partially because good networks cost money ; then I think we should consider that while a good website beats a bad website, sometimes a bad website beats no website. Sometimes a "cheap plastic product" means someone that can't buy the well designed product can still buy a product, and get started in a hobby.

This is pretty bad news for craftsmen I think, but as a software engineer that is very happy to be able to get into crochet or photo or cyanotypes or pottery or hiking for relatively cheap, I can't help but try to see the other side of software getting cheaper.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026427511...

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