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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

#111

Post by josephg »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #75
josephg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken." ??? 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."

React state bugs are usually not invisible failure modes.

Other kinds of software - for example, the backend of a website - have far more invisible failure modes. Security. Correctness. Performance. Bad API design leading to overfetching. Etc. Software works great on your machine and when you demo it, but it falls apart at scale. Endpoints that aren't secured properly. Race conditions cause silent data corruption. Memory leaks. And so on.

If claude messes up writing a react frontend, we're more likely to find the problem quickly. And frontend bugs usually don't continue to cause problems after they've been fixed. Silent bugs in the backend are more dangerous and more expensive.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#112

Post by card_zero »

bayindirh wrote: post #50
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These things are very subtle and are sometimes about ethos, and not about value at all. For instance:

* You propose I buy your ¤4 overhyped toothbrush. If I spend 10 minutes digging around, I could find a sub-¤1 toothbrush. Effectively I'm doing 10 minutes of work at less than minimum wage in order to avoid owning the premium toothbrush. Do I do this? I might! The reason is that I want no part in your hype.

* You offer me a loyalty scheme that will genuinely save me money if I participate. I only have to pay attention to your offers and routinely identify myself and I might get 10% savings, all the time. I decline this because you don't get to use my brain cycles for your profit, even if I profit too.

* You offer me a free thing that happens to track me and funnels data to data brokers. I decline it even though it does me no actual harm at all, because I don't want you to make money from personal facts about me, even when the facts are robotically aggregated and anonymised. Ethics are at stake: ethically speaking, you can just piss off. That is worth more than a free gadget, and it's not even an equation.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#113

Post by owebmaster »

rickbergfalk wrote: post #63

> 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?

> Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX?

Definitely not. That's skill issues. The shadow DOM can be a bit tricky.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#114

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#115

Post by latchkey »

toyg wrote: post #104
latchkey wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see I'm under your skin as you're trying to make this personal. I have a long history of being early and correct with many things. What is transforming under your nose, faster than anything ever before, will take you for surprise, unless make a conscious decsion to wake up. Do yourself a favor and listen to what he's saying... https://youtu.be/NYFGCESmikA?t=2883

I was not the one who brought personal qualifications into a public argument, Jon. I guess you don't like it when your lack of specialized knowledge becomes evident. As I said, I already know what AI is doing - I already use it just fine, I even help building and selling it. The impact it is having is obvious. But like recipe books did not turn everyone into Michelin chefs, it won't turn hacks into rigorous builders…

So you think AI will only ever be a recipe book? That's the disconnect we have in opinion.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#116

Post by chanux »

> For better or worse, React is heavily overrepresented in the training weights, and “agent experience” is starting to matter more than developer experience.

Another winner takes all situation. This and the other post on agent tool use[1] makes me think we are in a period of great homogenization. I'm sure there's a group that's delighted about this but for me, it just makes me feel a little uneasy.

[1] https://armature.tech/blog/which-tools-coding-agents-install

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#117

Post by redwood »

chanux wrote: post #116

> For better or worse, React is heavily overrepresented in the training weights, and “agent experience” is starting to matter more than developer experience. Another winner takes all situation. This and the other post on agent tool use[1] makes me think we are in a period of great homogenization. I'm sure there's a group that's delighted about this but for me, it just makes me feel a little uneasy. [1] https://armatu…

See https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02209 but I hope researchers are looking to tackle this problem

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#118

Post by sci_prog »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92
kypro wrote: post #69

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?…

> Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. You absolutely should've rejected it. Putting slop into production is a huge trap, because now the humans can't understand it and the LLM is just going to make it worse and worse over time.

I think what OP is saying is that the fact that a human can't understand it won't matter as the code will only ever be read by AI.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#119

Post by oefrha »

nozzlegear wrote: post #110
oefrha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idiot can spend one minute now to acquire this amazing knowledge that you can just ask ChatGPT “I need a website”. If they don’t know now, sooner or later they’ll know from a short TikTok or something in the next couple of months/years. Not to mention AI companies are spending $$$ on ads to raise awareness; professionals already know they can create slides with LLMs, literally nothing’s different when it comes to…

You're not accounting for how deeply unpopular AI is with the general public. Would anyone be making those TikTok videos in the first place? Would OP's wife want to use AI if he wasn't there to advocate it?

Given that my nontechnical coworker has shared quite a few of these TikToks/Google Shorts with me, yes tons of people are making them. I don’t know what kind of alternative reality you live in, you can just go to any social media site and search for “create website with ChatGPT” etc. and check the view counts.

Plus the context here isn’t any random person, but people who intend to pay for website development for their businesses.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#120

Post by livinglist »

etoxin wrote: post #76

I was originally a Flash developer, when that died when Steve Jobs banned it from iPhones, I pivoted to frontend. I got to see web evolve over the next decade or so and loved every part of it. 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, t…

I think that is the nature of being a software engineer, even before AI you had to keep learning new libraries/SDKs/APIs/languages to keep up with the industry trend. I think it will remain the same in the age of AI, good engineers will adapt.
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