We need the exact opposite of this.
A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#22Reading this hurt so much. Please just write articles by hand. I don’t care about perfect grammar and I don’t care about your article sounding „native“ or not. But I do care about not having to read the word „genuinely“ a hundred times just because Claude likes it so much.
But OP (or LLM) is sort of funny :)
> Now a beginner's tutorial opens with sixteen tools you've never heard of, half of them named after Japanese words for "fast," and the first command downloads more code than the Apollo guidance computer ran on, just to render a contact form.
After finishing the post, yes OP was funny, at the beginning only unfortunately. The rest of text is so LLMish that it hurts.
The beginning was promising…
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#23For some reason I find Claude's writing often has an oddly condescending tone when it tries to be empathetic.
“Every tool is scar tissue over a real wound. Follow the wounds, and the map draws itself. THE ONE IDEA THAT UNLOCKS EVERYTHING” uh-huh I have noticed myself having a visceral reaction to the AI tells now, somewhere between disgust and anger. And I am not an angry man and I like AI! There is just something about the voice that is incredibly off-putting, like a know-it-all friend who just ripped a giant fart. It is an…
I don't know how else to put it, but it has this built in condescension that rides along when someone is hitting you with too many clever metaphors. Like it's TED talking at you or something, it just frames everything in a tone of authoritative/lecturing style. Very off putting just as if an actual person did it you would feel irritated by them
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#24For some reason I find Claude's writing often has an oddly condescending tone when it tries to be empathetic.
To me it bears similarities to the writings of Rebecca Hazelton:
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#25Reading this hurt so much. Please just write articles by hand. I don’t care about perfect grammar and I don’t care about your article sounding „native“ or not. But I do care about not having to read the word „genuinely“ a hundred times just because Claude likes it so much.
I just used the modern method for articles like that. I read the headlines, skimmed the prose that has no purpose other than 'it was what the AI put out', then read the conclusion. Similarly, I skip video content where the title is something like "How to get better fuel economy for your car" and the video starts "Let's investigate the entire history of wheels", and the whole video could just be a guy sat in a chair s…
You are right, it feels like clickbait for blog posts / articles.
And once you notice the bait (via telltale signs) you feel betrayed. Betrayed for your attention, thoughts and time.
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#26People are focused on the authorship of the prose so I'll offer something different: imo this correctly covers the steps of the evolution of modern frontend and explains the reasoning well.
A lot of people on this site complain about modern tooling but this stuff wasn't done for kicks. React (and npm, I think) was (were) _so good_ at solving the problems it solved that we were willing to deal with the fallout.
Now that we're back to consolidating all of the gains through server side rendering, I think we're in a much better place overall.
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#27I was wondering what anybody thought of a library I wrote a few years ago: https://www.combatentropy.com/tools/cobblestone/
Many sites could be built on the stack espoused by Alex Petros, "The Hundred-Year Web Service", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lASLZ9TgXyc>: SQLite, Express.js, Nunjucks, and HTMX.
But if your app needs islands of interactivity, my library does it in a way that I haven't seen elsewhere.
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#28> In 2008 you saved a file called index.html, dragged it onto an FTP client, and watched a little progress bar crawl to the right.
When I was first learning web development in the 90s, after a couple of sites, I switched to a hosting provider that offered a bit more control over the hosting environment. I discovered that they supported SCP and SFTP but not FTP. When I asked them why, they told me it was because FTP was old and insecure. I dig a bit of digging to learn about the situation, and sure enough, FTP was 25+ years old already and literally a decade older than the Internet (FTP: 1971; TCP/IP: 1981) and was obsolete and much less secure than the modern alternatives available in the late 90s.
This was a full decade before “the olden times” of 2008 that the article talks about, so using FTP even back then was a massively outdated way of working.
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#29Reading this hurt so much. Please just write articles by hand. I don’t care about perfect grammar and I don’t care about your article sounding „native“ or not. But I do care about not having to read the word „genuinely“ a hundred times just because Claude likes it so much.
I just used the modern method for articles like that. I read the headlines, skimmed the prose that has no purpose other than 'it was what the AI put out', then read the conclusion. Similarly, I skip video content where the title is something like "How to get better fuel economy for your car" and the video starts "Let's investigate the entire history of wheels", and the whole video could just be a guy sat in a chair s…
I'd summarize the concept as, this youtube video could have been a tweet
Re: A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML
#30Reading this hurt so much. Please just write articles by hand. I don’t care about perfect grammar and I don’t care about your article sounding „native“ or not. But I do care about not having to read the word „genuinely“ a hundred times just because Claude likes it so much.
THIS THIS THIS THIS AND THIS.
I was GENUINELY (ha, see what I did there?) interested and started reading, only to immediately understand that no human sweat was spent in writing what I was reading.
The result is that within 2 minutes I went from "fantastic, just what I needed" to "fuck, no way I'm spending my time reading this, considering it's probably hallucinating parts that could not work as described". It doesn't matter if text is perfect, it's the "vibe of the vibe" that just puts me off. Plus, the design SCREAMS Claude Code.
So, to everyone who does or thinks of doing what the author of this text did, a pledge:
PLEASE, take time to implement your ideas. That's what gives them value. Nobody forces you to produce this slop nor to implement your ideas, even if you think it's the best in the world.
If you do, and you think that shortcutting like this equals being productive, you are sorely delusional. You are producing slop, and you are only contributing to noise. And if you do that in the hope that something produced this way might eventually take off in a game of large numbers, well you're just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it might stick. All of it will still be shit.