71–80 of 274 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer
Typing the code was never the interesting part.
Code is fascinating! An abstract language to compile to program a CPU. So many ways to do this!
Now we're using natural language, which at times is extremely verbose. "[{}]" versus "array of objects", for example.
In my useless opinion, most people are not aware of how big AI is and how bigger it will be in 3~5 years. It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem, but there are people who are completely blind about it
> It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem Like hunger and diseases are global problems not to be worried about.
In my useless opinion, most people are not aware of how big AI is and how bigger it will be in 3~5 years. It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem, but there are people who are completely blind about it
This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just for the record, I'm a backend dev. So I don't have much stake in this game.
This idea is, of course, not uncommon. "If the backend has to treat the frontend as adversarial anyway, and has all this cool stuff (constraints etc) for guaranteeing consistency of the system, then the frontend can just do whatever, right?" It plays into a lot of biases around typical frontend devs, typical backend devs, language stereotypes, etc. So it _sounds_ good.
Let me tell you for a moment about one of the spookiest bugs I've seen. It was an app for sorting personal photos. You'd upload pics/vids off your phone, they appear in the UI, you click a folder for them to go into (or click delete to discard), etc. Simple app, right?
Well, naturally, pics from even vaguely modern phones are regularly 5MB or more. Not really something you want to sling around while a user is browsing and their main activity is going to be looking at said pic to decide what folder it goes in (or if it gets deleted). So we thumbnail. And the main app only ever shows the user the thumbnails. The backend organized things quite simply: it gets a list of images from the frontend, it assigns each of them a zero-based index, and generates a thumbnail you'll also access via index. Imagine a URL scheme like `images/0` and `images/0/thumbnail` serving the real assets and the thumbnail.
Well, this app had a bug at one point. The backend was indexing by the arbitrary order the user uploaded them in. The frontend was mostly doing this too. Unfortunately the logic for thumbnails was incorrectly indexing by the "taken time" (which was a post-upload timestamp constructed by looking at basically every available timestamp and picking the "best" one. i.e. hopefully the one the iOS camera app adds, but obviously pics come from other places too and you never know what a user will upload). The end result being users would upload pics, see a thumbnail of an accidental pic they took of their shoe, hit delete. But actually they were deleting a pic of their baby or similar.
Literally none of the testing caught this for 2 main reasons: headless tests don't look at images, and you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image") (at least not easily... i guess image models could do it now? but probabilistic? not a word i like in my unit tests? I digress, this predated the current crop of "AI").
Now let me generalize: your frontend isn't just a weird way to call RPCs on your backend. It's part of the application. I don't think you can just hand-wave. And as we saw above, you can't even say "well the frontend is stateless! any bug is 1 deploy away from fixing!" - deploying the frontend didn't get anyone their baby pictures back.
> 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…
??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states.
I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."
Now, still as a frontend engineer albeit much more senior. The writing is on the wall, again. It's time to reskill for AI.
It's not bad news.
We as experienced engineers are needed to help build in the guardrails, frameworks, the new tooling, etc. There is a lot of work that is needed that requires actual engineers with technical experience.
Like the early internet, I see this as a new beginning and we get to decide how it evolves.
> 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.
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-…
Did you notice that this is completely unrelated to the idea that the $20 would turn a profit for the business?
It's just the argument "$20 isn't very much money, so why not spend it?".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoken with the true arrogance of someone who has no idea about the real world of finance. When your software has to produce legal documents, satisfy auditors, and certify a bunch of things to shareholders and governments, I'm sorry but your $200 vibecoded hack is not going to cut it. You will have to get it certified, to get it audited, to get it secured according to this and that legislation, to prove where it gets…
You sound like someone who was adversed to cell phone cameras taking over film. Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam.
It is, indeed. The C-Suites at every company are making plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmU9uovmT2A
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sound like someone who was adversed to cell phone cameras taking over film. Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam.
> Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam. It is, indeed. The C-Suites at every company are making plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmU9uovmT2A
But more real... Giacomo fails to take into account the concept of when OpenAI decides to create an audited financial service that guarantees that their output is valid. ChatGPT Work is already a beginning of that future.