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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?

#171

Post by J_Shelby_J »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #58

We're in the software industry. The whole point of that industry is automating things that are very repetitive. Frontend projects are very repetitive. And now AI is doing that for us. Fantastic, fees up a lot of time to build more interesting things. De-skilling for skills that just aren't that relevant anymore because we've solved the problem (with AI or otherwise) has been a constant in our industry ever since comp…

The point of software is to encode human will into machine communicable state.

The entire complaint here is that automating this risks that was is encoded is not what you want.

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

#172

Post by thinkingtoilet »

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…

Exactly. The web pre jquery and bootsrap was a mess and not pleasant to code for. If you want to talk about low quality that was the norm back then.

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

#173

Post by johsole »

sevenzero wrote: post #87
lqet wrote: post #71

This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS…

On the other hand, using frameworks later on was a good attempt to standardize things. Having some homegrown GUI nobody knows how to work with isn't an advantage either. Personally I refuse things that "feel" too big (Nuxt/Next), but like Vue... Currently though, I want to get rid of most Javascript so I'll work my way to HTMX or Alpine type solutions with server side templates. Personally the less tech I use the bet…

+1 for htmx + Django, really my favorite stack for development.

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

#174

Post by x0x0 »

coldtea wrote: post #124
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'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. And I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions, all the way to modern multi-MB frameworks and Electron, is a regression. Of course no one gives a shit about things like the user's computer/memory utilization. Or de…

> feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions

But again, accidental complexity. The web platform is utterly rotten. So the people we should blame are chrome et al for not providing a standard lib or anything approaching a reasonable UI framework, which forces people to reimplement what a competent platform provides.

Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron. I don't think anybody likes building in Electron; it's just it's that or +200% (or more) eng headcount to build 3 apps, one per platform.

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

#175

Post by 8note »

customguy wrote: post #56
aspenmartin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? Assume everybody is now using LLM because they're better, and because the people who created artisanal things in their free time out of sheer generosity no longer have free time, or any food at all, or simply no longer feel generous. And the few people who are such specialists that they would be slowed down by them only do proprietary work, f…

still though, whats causing the old code to disappear? the old discussions to disappear?

theyve already been added to all the big labs' datasets, its not like its going anywhere.

but even moreso, accessibility tools exist because people need them, and will make it known when the accessibility is broken.

the screen reader is still gonna expose an api or have observable outputs.

There's very real forcing functions that will keep making useful content about what people want and need from accessibility tools, and how to interact with existing tools.

you're still building for people and the harness operator as time goes on, will probably be the actual user, and will push the LLM to adjust the code to be great for them

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

#176

Post by redsocksfan45 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #80
m132 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "acce…

> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend. The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for thi…

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

#177

Post by 8note »

ActionHank wrote: post #108
kangalioo wrote: post #46

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 w…

I think your ignorance is showing. There is far more to it than all that. I've interviewed far too many nextjs experts who couldn't do anything else. That's not a skill, that's just knowledge, which at this point is freely available.

im not clear what makes that not a skill?

other people cant do anything with nextjs, or anything with any front end at all.

its applied knowledge, understanding how nextjs works, and using it to build some application

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

#178

Post by prontos91 »

I had recently needed to build a dashboard builder. Simple one. Copilot created it within minutes. A working even though simple looking one. Several more inputs later i had a working usable one. Came back to it later but my tokens are finished :(. So i had to manually review the code and make changes. Code was around 3k lines in one single file and another 500 of css code. Took me a long time to understand the code and make changes. A few days i had to make another change which changes the way it supposed to work But now without tokens it was very difficult since need to make changes in several areas which kept on breaking. Finally i re-wrote it to my understanding.

This was a small part of a large code base. I am afraid what a fully agent coding would look like. How are other developers handling large code bases with ai. Just accept what its providing?

I can now understand the valuation of AI companies. Once you go in ai its difficult to go back. You need to spend more tokens just to make it work. Ai companies could train to make their code more obtuse, making users very hard to change manually!

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

#179

Post by Traubenfuchs »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #81
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sour…

But how will the current crop of “elite engineers” be replaced, when they inevitably age out?

There will always be some nerds left with brains so big they only scratch their itch if they are advancing performance critical v8 code in pure assembler. But the bar will rise for that to be something you get money for…

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

#180

Post by 8note »

kinda funnily I think front end died right when all the folks say that the golden age began, at least for craftsmen.

Flash is/was the true time for front end innovation and people making cool unique stuff. html and javascript and usability studies killed all the fun and imagination

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