Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mastrojs.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 352 posts

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

#31

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

altmanaltman wrote: post #6
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…

nostalgia is one hell of a drug

Web has always fucking sucked, and it fucking sucks today. The only way to make the web technologies not suck is to use them to power a vacuum cleaner.

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

#32

Post by kristianc »

bakugo wrote: post #28
Filligree wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's not what I said, I said I likely understand it less than a 635B parameter LLM, and that using the LLM as a shortcut to that knowledge is something I'd consider perfectly acceptable. I might even become better at it through using the LLM.

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

#33

Post by neuroblaster »

Very interesting, i didn't know that frontend developers experienced deskilling before. I thought that slop was the usual way of doing things in frontend (or backend).

Apparently deskilled people are making it look like this is normal and it supposed to be so.

But i can relate to that. Another examples of deskilling would be, of course, Java, and a more modern example - Rust.

That said, i don't think deskilling is solving mass-production problem. It was already solved with open-source software, or with a software as is.

Software is information and there is little to no cost of copying information. So mass-production isn't the problem that is being solved here.

IMO the problem being solved is that business need unskilled labor, that is slop.

You would think that if business is producing slop, it will be replaced with another business producing quality stuff. If that was so, over time, there won't be any slop on the market, but if you open your app store, you are welcomed by all kinds of slop.

Because slop is what they buy. Supply is only following the demand, business need to produce slop because people are buying it.

How many of you guys have Claude subscription? Do you know that 5 years ago i would be asking "How many of you guy have GitHub Copilot subscription"?

This is what people buy, so it is deskilling, but not a mass-production, it's just slop revolution, slop is the new norm.

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

#34

Post by trjordan »

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'…

Totally. Every "we're losing our craft" article has the same gloomy shape. That's enough of a bummer, but they also argue against themselves halfway through.

This one, for instance:

> But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through.

Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical understanding, because there's no way around it. I agree. Why is the whole tone of this thing "AI is making my craft a cheap commodity?"

Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults. Content mills / SEO / news sites are a separate, terrible failure mode of ads and corporate incentives. That's not React's fault!

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

#35

Post by wongarsu »

We already had a phase of "deskilled" frontend development: Adobe Flash. Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required. Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript) you could get full interactivity, and animations were fully editable in UI. Sure, all of this came at a terrible price: no accessibility, no SEO discovery, huge loading times. But it also created some of the most innovative and artistic front ends. And a lot of things that should have never seen the light of day

SVG+CSS+HTML were hailed as the modern replacement for Flash, but nobody ever made an authoring tool suitable for the masses. LLMs are kind of fixing that, just with a very different interface

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

#37

Post by sublinear »

> 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 – to just name a few.

It still is!

> To distinguish what they’re doing from what “frontend” has become, practitioners of this arcane art nowadays often refer to it as the “front of the frontend”.

I have never heard this term before, but I'm sure someone will point me to the bullshit influencer who came up with it?

Frontend frameworks are really just for web apps and most frontend devs are familiar with several. If they cannot also write a web page from scratch, they're not really a web dev. This is not up for debate. If you hire someone for the role, you need them to handle the work. AI is not going to help you here when it gets into the testing and bugfix phase.

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

#38

Post by sevenzero »

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'…

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

It depends. My country (Germany) introduced accessibility laws recently which enforces you to build everything public with accessibility in mind. If a page doesn't meet the expected standard you can get extremely high fines.

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

#39

Post by efsher_azoy2 »

My humble opinion: “deskilling” is an illusion. Sure, I don’t write code by hand anymore, but I spend most of my time using the knowledge and “sixth sense” I’ve developed throughout my career to control what AI is doing.

At the end of the day, I have to make more architectural and business decisions than before - it’s just higher-level and more complex work.

On the other hand, there’s increasingly little reason to hire someone just to write APIs or work on the frontend, since AI handles most of the routine tasks.

So, this feels much more like the Industrial Revolution than “deskilling.”

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

#40

Post by layer8 »

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.

That’s not what accidental complexity means. Accidental complexity comes from design errors that could have in hindsight been avoided, meaning that if those errors hadn’t been made (made by accident, literally), there wouldn’t be any accidental complexity. The items you list aren’t accidents that could be avoided, they are necessities in achieving relevant goals.
Post reply on HN