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The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

nolanlawson.com

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Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#41

Post by kolinko »

jplusequalt wrote: post #24
chpatrick wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing the code was never the interesting part.

>Typing the code was never the interesting part. But solving hard problems and developing systems intuition was. If you're trying to tell me that people working on code bases predominantly written by AI are still solving hard problems themselves, or understand the systems the AI is building, I think they're lying to themselves.

From what I’ve seen they get to the level of understanding of systems way faster than we did because they iterate and experiment with this from day one. We had to spend years understanding code syntax, and other minutia.

Also, you need a different kind of toolset/skillset to grok a system that was vibe coded all the way - different failure scenarios. Older devs tend to just say “see, I told you, it’s just spaghetti underneath, you need to clean it up”, and the newer gen learns to work with that spaghetti.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#42

Post by shostack »

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

Being a programmer has always meant dealing with abstraction layers and climbing up the abstraction ladder.

You are simply learning a new language, whose syntax happens to look like English (or whatever language you speak), but with new, undiscovered, and constantly changing design patterns and best practices.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#43

Post by chowells »

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.

It's nothing at all how like C runs on top of assembly. C has semantics. Code means something without ever being run. You can check in your source code and (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today.

Try checking in only your prompts and nothing else. Just the parts you actually typed. See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code. Do not mix them up.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#44

Post by latchkey »

toyg wrote: post #39
latchkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model I'm sure many people will think that; and I'm also fairly confident that 5 years later they'll take their obscure, bug-ridden, vibecoded monstrosity that nobody really understands, throw it out, and get a salesforce contract. Technical debt doesn't disappear just because you have agents working for you; in fact, it is ex…

Context is important in a response like this. Giacomo is a Sr. Presales consultant at a SaaS company that sells "The AI operating system for modern Finance." Of course you're adverse to things because it is a direct threat to what your business offers today.

If I can vibe code up a solution that fixes my problems for $200, it doesn't matter what happens in 5 years. The rate of change that's happening today in the increase in quality of the output of the models, I can just tell it to fix whatever we have and make it better.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#45

Post by josephg »

Supermancho wrote: post #31

> The frontend is less risky to just hand to an agent. The smaller the problem, the less risky it is to do this, regardless of the nature of the problem. This is not a frontend-specific issue today.

Frontend development - perhaps more than any other kind of software development - is “what you see is what you get”. There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken.

Systems engineering isn’t like that. Vibe coders beware: A database could silently corrupt data, or have latent security vulnerabilities. It might have a badly designed query language that will be difficult to change later. But frontend code can be rewritten at will. It’s a perfect target for LLMs.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#46

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bayindirh wrote: post #40
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so. if website does not lead to customers - why do any of that? actually why have website? Once you say yes to website you imply having one is somehow valuable, so in that case why not spend 20 dollars.

Just because websites can exist. Sometimes things are done for fun, or just for the sake of it. This perspective declares all the personal websites of people worthless, however, they are priceless. Because people's curiosity and creativity is priceless as well. Similarly, why create art and share it around if it doesn't bring in customers? Why make music, take photos, dance? Do we live to serve customers, or do custo…

Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $).

If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-bono psychology practice then you can translate the dollar signs to units of happiness or whatever (which I would imagine is her real goal regardless).

This person is spending her time to create the website (with ChatGPT's help). How much is that time worth? Of course when it's your business hourly pay is tricky, but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much of it.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#47

Post by josephg »

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

It depends how much you outsource to the llm.

If you outsource everything to a llm, I just don’t think you get very good results right now. Language models aren’t great at remembering all the little design decisions that are needed in medium to large projects. The code ends up riddled with semi-conflicting design choices, which have been slammed together and maintained by context inertia. For a lot of projects this is more than fine - sometimes higher quality work simply isn’t worth my time. But for a lot of projects, you will pay for that slop later.

But I think there is a useful middle ground. If you carefully review all the decisions an llm makes, I think you can often be more productive than just programming everything by hand. But it’s a very different way to do engineering. I think I learn more this way than if I program by hand - if only because I’m touching more code. My mind roves around the design space a lot more. I don’t lock in as much as when I’m programming each piece individually.

If you work with an llm like this, your engineering skill matters more than ever.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#48

Post by bayindirh »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #46
bayindirh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because websites can exist. Sometimes things are done for fun, or just for the sake of it. This perspective declares all the personal websites of people worthless, however, they are priceless. Because people's curiosity and creativity is priceless as well. Similarly, why create art and share it around if it doesn't bring in customers? Why make music, take photos, dance? Do we live to serve customers, or do custo…

Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $). If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-…

I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space.

If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well.

Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online presence. Instead, their abilities and expertise moved them to the top in their respective fields, and the whole community knows how and when to reach them.

So, maybe a shiny website is not a hard-requirement for a good psychology practice, IDK.

So, the thing is, maybe this was her way to explore new things and decompress while doing some mundane thing from her perspective for free. Sometimes it's not that $20 which you can pay without any negative side-effects, but the desire to see how far the thing goes without the token, or just because you don't feel any urgency to do the task, so that $20 looks like an unnecessary waste.

I have been in both places.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#49

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bayindirh wrote: post #48
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $). If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-…

I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space. If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well. Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online…

Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years!

If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost.

Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising.

Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads...

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#50

Post by bayindirh »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #49
bayindirh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space. If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well. Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online…

Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years! If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost. Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising. Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing…

From what I have seen, people's perspective on value lies on a very wide spectrum. My mom won't buy a YouTube premium subscription, because she said she likes the ads. It's a kind of discovery platform for her. It's not that I share the same perspective, but I respect her about that.

I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.).

For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it.

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