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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?

#41

Post by Forgeties79 »

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'…

Yesterday we saw on the frontpage that LLM’s can’t even accurately assess if California produces literally all the almonds in the world.

The really weird gaps and inconsistencies just make it to untrustworthy. I spend so much time vetting all the outputs that it often cancels out the time it saves me, and I find enough errors that I don’t have an incentive to streamline things/not vet it.

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

#42

Post by madeofpalk »

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'…

> this is largely accidental complexity.

Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem.

Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other constraints of the web platform.

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

#43

Post by ElProlactin »

everdrive wrote: post #30
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 decl…

If your requirements are reasonable and serve the needs of end users and the business, doing "the bare minimum" isn't such a bad thing. "I just remove everything that is not David."

Of course, the requirements aren't always right, but in my experience, engineers/developers are just as capable as business owners of defining requirements poorly.

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

#44

Post by traverseda »

madeofpalk wrote: post #42
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'…

> this is largely accidental complexity. Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem. Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other c…

>that has to deal with the other constraints of the web platform.

Well there's your problem right there

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

#45

Post by knuckleheads »

trjordan wrote: post #34
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…

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

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

#46

Post by kangalioo »

The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions.

Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is web standards and conventions. The fact that it works at all and is merely a little leaky is an accomplishment in itself.

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

#47

Post by fantasizr »

neuroblaster wrote: post #33

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 so…

Everyone had a chance to learn vanilla js from the mozilla docs but using jquery was much much simpler. Concede that jquery is more difficult than prompting. The issue for me is that prompting a front end and everything looks exactly the same. More cookie cutter than what wordpress and wix offered

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

#48

Post by efsher_azoy2 »

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?

I guess the author never tried to write big FE application in jQuery :D It definitely required some skill.

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

#49

Post by culebron21 »

I worked mostly on frontend in 2012-16, in plain HTML+CSS, and then quit, because React was required everywhere, and I tried and hated it.

But before React, I don't recall frontend as very inspiring and joyful.

It was fun to see your work immediately on the screen. I did apply skills and had to solve some weird situations. I could optimize our CSS with OOCSS approach (later used in Bootstrap) -- only to complaints -- semantics! too many classes! (my trump card was that their commits contained +200 lines of CSS, while mine mostly had 0 -- and our CSS was already bloated into several megabytes).

But this was a dead end. I tried making tools to find out unused styles, to automate some patterns -- like click a button and load some content over Ajax. But the guys, who copy-pasted code with dumb solution to this, got 2-3x more tickets closed. I proposed a tool to make screenshots of pages and diff them to search for regressions, but the response was it's heavy RnD, we're not a research institute, we got to ship the next popup tomorrow, etc.

Nobody gave a shit much earlier.

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

#50

Post by fny »

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'…

"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.
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