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The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

nolanlawson.com

131–140 of 284 posts

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#131

>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 p…

Yep. I don't know why this is so hard for teams to understand: if the part your customers pay you to interact with (the UI/UX) doesn't fucking work, your customers are going to leave.

We need to kill this two-party-system-brain crap and siloing front end and back end. Learn both. It isn't difficult. It allows you to design much better systems that avoid complexity and unreliability.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think they meant more along the lines of "This narrow problem today is not worth worrying about, because soon it will be a larger and bigger problem. "

That's still a silly argument though

How about we worry about this smaller problem today so the bigger problem tomorrow is less big. Or doesn't materialize at all?

Do we have to sleepwalk off this cliff?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#133
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…

Wasn't that true for tech in general though? I mean I have heard developers bitching about React for years now and every year I saw it get more adopted at the same time. Of course some obviously do not like it but the decision was usually driven by business and not coders. I feel its a simillar thing happening with AI code taste being primarily developed by big tech firms which ofc love homogenization. But its not all bad, I don't think people will just give up working on what they like because agent expeirenxe got better but who knows though

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#134

"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…

> you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image"

You can though. Maybe not exactly what you are thinking but there are some pretty good image similarity algorithms like dhash out there that do stuff like this. Mostly they get used to check for duplicate uploads, copyright materials, or "does this look like porn" style filters

This isn't something that needs image models to accomplish really.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#135

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?

[deleted]

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#136

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.

Wow, it’s fascinating after waking up to see all this conjecture here on why she didn’t pay for the subscription.

The short version, wasn’t for wanting to save money, but simply a matter of it not being worth the hassle to any of us to subscribe and then later cancel for such a small scope of work. If it was too frustrating I would have let her use my Claude sub.

Also, she’d been meaning to have it updated for years, a few extra days was nothing.

She did short sessions in spare time between other things, the wait between was maybe a little frustrating, but also gave the benefit that she would have had better clarity develop between sessions.

Website is not key to her business where it’s mostly word of mouth at this point (she’s been practicing for >20 years). Goals of website were:

- Findable in Google by “psychologist/therapist ” (she also has a Google. Business profile so is findable on Google Maps).

- Minimal copy. A comforting sentence or two to state philosophy, qualifications, therapy types offered, where located, how to contact.

- Doesn’t feel dated.

Essentially it’s meant to complement the word of mouth aspect and maybe bring in the occasional completely new patient.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#137

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.

> I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20 If it because the poster's mother dislikes the idea of subscriptions, then I totally get it. (Though I admit I have no idea if this has anything to do with the poster's mother's decision.) I'll go out of my way as much as I can to avoid signing up for anything that is a subscription because of how horrible the entire corporate world has abused subscription…

See my more detailed sibling comment, but was more that the scope and urgency were so small that it wasn’t worth the hassle to set up the subscription and have to cancel it after.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#138

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?

Only minimally, after 20 years of practicing word of mouth does 99% of the work.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does updating the website bring in additional money?

Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?

She had no shortage of patients from word of mouth, but old website was minor liability in its datedness potentially putting off prospective patients.

People already knew about her and website is essentially just “this is what I do, where I am and how you can contact me”.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Does the world need the "uniqueness" of 40 similar web frameworks?
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