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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

#61

Post by owebmaster »

josephg wrote: post #45
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…

The UX is what makes the users use the apps, systems, games, their phones.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#62

Post by mplewis »

dostick wrote: post #56
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…

She wouldn’t be able to do any of that without you setting it up first. She would not know anything about deepseek, meaning of a folder with index.html file. Would not know even what to ask ChatGPT, “I need a website”? You make it sound like easy task anyone can do, when you provided 99% of otherwise impossible for them to easily obtain key knowledge needed.

you can literally do that to chatgpt

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#63

Post by rickbergfalk »

> Meanwhile, Cursor and Viget have blogged about migrating their codebases from Solid and Lit, respectively, to React.

That was maddening to read. Here I was thinking we should all be migrating to better performing frontend solutions. Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#64

Post by stickfigure »

I offer this, as someone who is heavy into AI development (as a coding assistant, not vibe-coding). I was pretty fast before and now I'm easily an order of magnitude faster.

* I scrutinize every line of backend code and frequently make revisions.

* I pay just barely enough attention to the frontend code to make sure it's not doing anything dumb.

* I pay zero attention to the CSS.

Either our expectations for UI interaction are going to go up a lot, or FE devs should start looking at product management roles. I think the asteroid metaphor is apt.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#65

Post by dijksterhuis »

comrade1234 wrote: post #32
snakeboy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted.

Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.

will not not necessarily be true for AI generated works in all territories

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#66

Post by King-Aaron »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is an entire industry built around this premise, yes.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#67

Post by Chaosvex »

comrade1234 wrote: post #32
snakeboy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted.

Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.

It's generally a little more complicated than that. Not up to writing paragraphs about it so I'll just leave this as a note so anybody that's interested can do their own research.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#68

Post by adamredwoods »

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…

The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. And if something doesn't quite work out, who's the backup?

For small shops and startups, this probably doesn't matter. For mission critical sites, who's more dependable? AI is a tool, that's all it is.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#69

Post by kypro »

As someone who loves FE the slop people are pushing where I work is really quite upsetting to me.

I reviewed some code earlier which clearly wasn't intended for consumed by humans and I know with certainty this dev wouldn't have understood 90% of what that code did. It looked like hours of Claude trying to force square into a round hole tbh, but it worked.

Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. If Claude can maintain it then who cares... Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world.

I wish it did matter of course, but like most of coding these days, it just doesn't.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#70

Post by technion »

reaperducer wrote: post #33
technion wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks.

Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks. You mean the very web sites that the "AI" trained on? If you think AI can't make buggy code, there are several dozen thousand comments on HN that disagree.

Ai cant make a static HTML page sitting on something like cloudflare pages have an rce bug.
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