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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?

#21

Post by aspenmartin »

customguy wrote: post #15
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 me…

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

It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories?

> 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.

OSS code and people’s public writings are available to anyone all the time. Common Crawl, the open source web crawl dump, has been around for over a decade. No one had any problem with these systems being developed on them, until they finally started to become useful, so what’s the sort of legal or ethical framework you’re pointing to?

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

#22

Post by jazz9k »

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.

Unionized workers are also losing their jobs in this economy.

Unions are, by nature, anti-progressive. They would rather use 15 year old technology, then replace workers and allow efficiency.

This will never work in the tech industry.

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

#23

Post by Zababa »

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 really depends, up until recently (January) reading all the Temporal doc and doing the courses allowed me to frequently suggest to the current frontier model things they didn't remember. I don't know if this changed recently.

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

#24

Post by Traubenfuchs »

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.

There is no guarantee that there will be a boom again. Some jobs disappear. Maybe we'll really only need a handful of elite engineers who continue advancing the foundational tools we use (kernels, databases, hyperscale low level cloud products, drivers, etc.) and the rest of "programmers" and "software engineers" will be replaced by "prompt engineers". With a new generation mostly unable to read and reason about source code.

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

#25

Post by ElProlactin »

> And we’re saddened that the new process results in lower quality work, and that a lot of people just don’t seem to care.

1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. There was a lot of mediocrity and worse.

2. I'm not sure the work is "lower quality" depending on how you define "quality". AI might result in an uncomfortable uniformity but at the same time, a lot of AI work product is pretty darn usable because the models have been trained against conventions that, love them or hate them, "work" for the vast majority of end users.

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

#26

Post by m132 »

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'…

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acceptable" and "decent" has thus been widening. As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". And the push is understandable as well, it's MVPs that make money and details only "increase customer satisfaction" at best (and these days, who even cares about customers?).

The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality, maybe even job satisfaction in general. As an (unfortunately anecdotal) example, I started to find myself fixing up broken websites or removing elements that get in the way with dev tools and uBlock every once in a while, and have heard from other people on here that they have been doing the same (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042747). All to restore basic functionality of websites I go on. This was never required back in the day, Flash and early web browsers didn't even have the option to do this.

Another, less anecdotal example from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

It gets worse when you realize that most of the money saved through these cuts only benefits the very top of the hierarchy.

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

#27

Post by dannyw »

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 used to make a living doing frontend development, and quirks and knowing idiosyncrasies is a burden to your craft. Yes, it meant there were higher barriers to entry, but it also resulted in a lot of broken websites, and I can tell you it was never fun nor rewarding.

I think the original author has a much stronger thesis around AI devaluing the craft of coding, but his specific examples don't stack up.

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

#28

Post by bakugo »

Filligree wrote: post #13
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”.

I wonder what went so wrong that "if you don't understand [thing] you shouldn't be building [thing]" is now considered a controversial statement.

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

#29

Post by dannyw »

sdevonoes wrote: post #12
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.

There's a huge difference between everything you mentioned, and dealing with 'browser quirks' like:
The points the author made simply aren't good arguments. Yes, frontend development was harder during those days, but not harder in a good or rewarding way.

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

#30

Post by everdrive »

ElProlactin wrote: post #25

> And we’re saddened that the new process results in lower quality work, and that a lot of people just don’t seem to care. 1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. There was a lot of mediocri…

>1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case.

I think this is more of "another brick in the wall." There was already a LOT of pressure to do the bare minimum to fulfill requirements and then declare success. Now, those pressures seem insurmountable.

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