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

The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

nolanlawson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 280 posts

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#11

Post by latchkey »

throwayay4929 wrote: post #10
latchkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough. the fact that y…

Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI

no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing.

i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written.

from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid of quickbooks because yesterday it was down and i couldn't log into it. figure out what i'm using there and present me an interface that allows me to do whatever i'm doing in quickbooks, but with my existing data from stripe, deel and mercury."

it then dutifully went off and built me that app and now i'm running it in parallel and synchronized with quickbooks, until i feel that i can just turn that off. it is customized exactly to my business workflow and easily maintained with full unit tests. it costs me nothing but a $200/mo codex subscription and a few hours of work.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#12

Post by Gualdrapo »

throwayay4929 wrote: post #10
latchkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough. the fact that y…

Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI

FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that.

Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result.

But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots of unreliable and unoptimized code that will go live if you don't know what they're doing under the hood and can potentially cause issues in the future. Remember that all this tools do are sorts of interpolation. I've seen lately lots of "modern" websites with tons layers of !important in their CSS and who knows the monstrosities that they have with their JS.

Meanwhile I and all people like me still don't have a job because all of this and the alleged "thousands" I was getting for doing this things.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#13

Post by rudi-c »

In a related but less public way, I've found myself less motivated to write internal documentation at work. It feels like in a lot of cases, it'd be better for the reader to throw Claude at the codebase to explain things.

A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. While I'm quite good at highlighting the most important insights and non-obvious traits of a system, I'd still be guessing what the reader needs from my doc at the end of the day. Claude can answer questions based on what the reader is curious about and wants to learn.

Some types of document are still useful, namely higher-level directional or philosophical topics about the intention of a codebase. e.g. "we would like to eventually move X system to Rust for Y reason", "we chose mutable data structures over immutable in this part of the system because Z". But fewer than before.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#14

Post by jonathanlydall »

comrade1234 wrote: post #5

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's st…

My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website.

I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded.

Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times.

But overall it was super empowering for her.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#15

Post by latchkey »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #12
throwayay4929 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI

FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that. Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result. But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots o…

the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that.

the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic job at that. that is what the OP was talking about in his article.

you don't have a job because you're not adapting to this new world order quickly enough. i predict that there will be insane demand for porting existing applications off these over priced SASS contracts and building tailored products for businesses. as much as they are trying to convince people, you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model and can envision a better solution to the actual problem out of thin air.

i'm burning 500m+ tokens a day on a $200/mo subscription. it is creating 10000x more value for me. it is no longer how much you know HTML/CSS, it is how well you know how to get AI to do what you want it to do and the only way to develop that skill, is to do it.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#17

Post by xyst »

comrade1234 wrote: post #5

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's st…

show us these "corporate websites"

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#18

Post by hirvi74 »

j4yav wrote: post #8
paulpauper wrote: post #2

Being a programmer in the era of AI now means configuring the AI and run environments to produce the sought result, than manipulating the code itself. It's like how C runs on top of assembly.

Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer

That is why I am very thankful for my job. We are not really allowed to use LLMs for much of anything.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#19

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #14
comrade1234 wrote: post #5

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's st…

My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website. I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded. Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times. But overall it was super empower…

Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#20

Post by thaumasiotes »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #19
jonathanlydall wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website. I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded. Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times. But overall it was super empower…

Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.

Does updating the website bring in additional money?
Post reply on HN