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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

#121

Post by leptons »

>But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code.

Tell that to Digg.

If you slop oit a front-end, your users will leave. It's that simple. The front-end is the part the users use the most, nobody cares how "elegant" your APIs are, or what kind of database the system uses. The front-end matters to users, a lot.

I've seen AI take a perfectly good front-end and slop out a piece of crap that will make the users leave in droves. And when nobody raises their hand (or in my case, everyone else is in the grip of AI psychosis) then bad times are ahead.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#122

Post by Supermancho »

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."

No need to engage with bad faith premises. You cant convince someone who is invested in their own FUD.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#123

Post by [deleted] »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #74

"Note I’m not saying there are zero risks: the agent could mess up accessibility, it could cause an infinite loop that blocks users, etc. But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse)." This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just fo…

[deleted]

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#124

Post by leptons »

gedy wrote: post #102

Maybe I'm an outlier here but I moved into front end to steer products and the resultant architecture into making sense from the incomplete or contradictory "requirements" we got from product and even UX. I've been doing this for over 20 years and every company has needed good engineers to make the product a logical reality. LLMs piping out UIs from PM prompts aren't solving that imho.

I spent 2 years developing and polishing a front end web application, and then some other engineers at my company pointed Claude at it to try to reproduce it. The slop it crapped out would make most if not all our users leave for the competition. Then they had the nerve to ask me to explain what was bad about the sloppified version. I'm looking for a new job.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#125

Post by cookiengineer »

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…

> period of great homogenization

It's called alignment. And that's the correct word for it in my opinion.

The most important part is that we have to find a way to tackle the knowledge enshittification problem.

Because now that slopcode and slopposts are everywhere, the average quality level will decrease. We had the peak internet knowledge, and it's now gradually getting worse.

That's not a personal opinion, that's how attention matrixes and their keys/values computation works.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#126

Post by skew-aberration »

cookiengineer wrote: post #125
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…

> period of great homogenization It's called alignment. And that's the correct word for it in my opinion. The most important part is that we have to find a way to tackle the knowledge enshittification problem. Because now that slopcode and slopposts are everywhere, the average quality level will decrease. We had the peak internet knowledge, and it's now gradually getting worse. That's not a personal opinion, that's h…

It was once called 'natural monopoly'

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#127

Post by tommica »

CqtGLRGcukpy wrote: post #108

There is going to come one day that companies (and any website owner) will wish they didn't use AI and instead used a simple (maybe even plain-text) website. That will come when people really need information from that website but can't get to it. https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performan... Discussion regarding that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734

Absolutely this. Although I like the shiny and polished looks, getting the info out is the most important, and it is hard yo beat pure black-on-white text

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#128

Post by rk06 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #81

I can't wait for the asteroid to hit C-Suite and senior execs. These are the most meaningless jobs and easiest to automate, with the most cost savings.

beware! using AI for middle management is how you speedrun to dystopia. Bad Managers can be fired, good managers can manage up. on other hand, "bad" AI will remain and continue to be dystopic, and "good" AI will be killed by higher management for being not being a doormat.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#129

Post by bluefirebrand »

cookiengineer wrote: post #125
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…

> period of great homogenization It's called alignment. And that's the correct word for it in my opinion. The most important part is that we have to find a way to tackle the knowledge enshittification problem. Because now that slopcode and slopposts are everywhere, the average quality level will decrease. We had the peak internet knowledge, and it's now gradually getting worse. That's not a personal opinion, that's h…

> It's called alignment

Alignment is such a polite term for "a giant boot that is crushing all of the uniqueness out"

Once it is done crushing, congrats! Everything is aligned.. by being flattened

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#130

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken

Any website that has any UI state management or does any kind of network calls can be invisibly broken in many, many ways

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