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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?

#201

Post by overgard »

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'…

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

Why is that straightforward? As an example, right now every year on Steam there are thousands of games released. A lot of them are just shovel ware that nobody ever plays, but it does end up hiding actual quality stuff in the noise. Same thing happens in app stores. Gatekeeping that limits opportunity is bad. But gatekeeping around quality is very good. Wanting your software to be written by someone who cares about software and has expertise is, to me, more straightforwardly good.

Right now people are blaming vibecoding for decline in a lot of mature software products, whether that's fair or not (I think it's frequently unfair). I think there's a possibility that's going to morph into "AI First" companies being seen as poor quality brands. Already we see in games that when listed they have to disclose if AI was used or not, and if it was, it damages the credibility quite a bit.

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

#202

Post by bigstrat2003 »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #193
mcmcmc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More people building things is straightforwardly good I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?

People can choose not to consume things that are straight garbage.

They can, in theory. But when the signal to noise ratio gets too low, it becomes prohibitively difficult to filter out the garbage. Thus I don't think it's true that more people creating things is a pure benefit. It may not even prove to be a benefit at all, on net.

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

#203

Post by HDThoreaun »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #202
HDThoreaun wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can choose not to consume things that are straight garbage.

They can, in theory. But when the signal to noise ratio gets too low, it becomes prohibitively difficult to filter out the garbage. Thus I don't think it's true that more people creating things is a pure benefit. It may not even prove to be a benefit at all, on net.

That's what critics are for. In our decentralized media environment it is not difficult to find critics for whatever youre interested in

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

#204

Post by t-writescode »

overgard wrote: post #201
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'…

> More people building things is straightforwardly good Why is that straightforward? As an example, right now every year on Steam there are thousands of games released. A lot of them are just shovel ware that nobody ever plays, but it does end up hiding actual quality stuff in the noise. Same thing happens in app stores. Gatekeeping that limits opportunity is bad. But gatekeeping around quality is very good. Wanting…

While I strongly agree that heavy LLM usage in industries that actually collect customer data, or make important decisions is INCREDIBLY harmful (with quite a bit of unfortunate regularity), democratizing coding “for all” especially in small, narrow niches, is similar to democratizing art, singing, music, general creating.

As long as it’s “for you” or “small time”, there really isn’t a problem at all.

The only real downside so far to LLMs (ignoring environmental concerns) is when they’re heavily used and left unrestrained to go play with financial data, healthcare data, PII, anything with real consequences when it breaks. If a person is using it to automate their life. If a father is using it to help their kid with accessibility issues speak. If an artist is using it to help them write code so they can make a game. These are all good things.

You might think it’s shovelware; but the creator of those things is now super excited that their vision was made or their niche issue was helped, when no one else would.

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

#205

Post by afavour »

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.

Less of an accident than a byproduct of the unique ecosystem the web lives in (which is a positive!) Compare to say, backend development. If I said database indexes are deeply inconvenient and that I shouldn't have to make them I'd get laughed out of the room and justifiably so. But by comparison when a developer says "I don't care to learn CSS" folks nod their heads in agreement.

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

#206

Post by fuzzy2 »

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…

> Frontend projects are very repetitive.

I’m sorry, what? This is such a shit take, I don’t even know where to start. What’s repetitive about them? That all UIs contain buttons or what?

If this is something that people actually believe, I can understand why UX has went to shit and then got even worse since the 90s.

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

#207

Post by 65 »

There is a difference between a run of the mill CRUD React app and solving specific, complex UI problems.

I have been a programmer for a long time and CSS is still the hardest language to master. There are countless quirks and APIs most people have never heard of that solve extremely specific problems.

For example, using @starting-style with allow-discrete to use display: none on CSS transitions. Knowing that you would need to use this API, what it does, and how to debug your CSS is a skill that will be hard to replace with an LLM because of the fine grained detail needed for CSS. If you do not know how this API works and you need to use it for whatever reason, and then need to adjust your transitions later, it's probably faster to have real CSS skills than to constantly have to prompt an LLM for you.

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

#208

Post by danielbln »

prontos91 wrote: post #178

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 a…

You handle large code base by enforcing best practices that should have always been enforced. Proper up to date documentation, strict adherence to conventions and coding guidelines, cross review of deliverables, TDD, and so on. Just whispering "make me a dashboard" into the machine's ear is not how you drive agents to create maintainable and understandable code.

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

#209

Post by bunher »

What is a bit missing in this discussion is that many frontends are very bad, user hostile or non-intuitive. This has nothing to do with LLMs or frameworks in my opinion just bad decisions of the designer. It is not only web apps or websites filled with e.g slow cookie warnings, terrible navigation, or dark patterns. Also the UX of Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows became at most average but not at all better (many things are just worse, buggy and inconsistent). If I had thought in the early 2000s how we interact with devices in the 2020s I would never have imagined thr mediocrity that those market leading billion dollar companies release and get away with it. LLMs obviously don’t help here since they are trained on all of this.

Especially elderly people who rarely use devices suffer from this (and their relatives who do IT support :-))

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

#210

Post by sillyfluke »

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…

>asserting that AI will botch software might hold more weight with people who have already forgotten how dogshit software was pre-AI.

You're responding to an assertion with an assertion. It has been empirically proven that SOTA models can create more dogshit software than pre-AI software. It is also trivially known that the user is unable to predict when and how the AI will introduce dogshit into the software. We literally had a study posted on this forum claiming models give more accurate answers if you're mean to them. This is the shit we're dealing with. Stuff you couldn't make up in a dystopian Douglas Adams novel.

>you can encode these things into prompts

Is this satire? SOTA models randomly disobey rules in prompts all the time.

When a dev drops a production db I can warn them. If they do it multiple times during their employment I can change their roles or fire them.

I can count the number of companies providing SOTA models with the fingers on my hands. Imagine having an employee pool of only 5 savant coders with dementia to choose from to hire to your company. That's it. Thats the entire applicant pool. You can only fire one of them by hiring one of the other four to replace them with. And you can't really fire them for dropping production dbs if you can't prevent the other ones from making the same mistake. This is the current AI-first hellscape as it stands.

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