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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

#141

Post by jonathanlydall »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #35
bayindirh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing office address? New qualifications? Better copy?

so. if website does not lead to customers - why do any of that? actually why have website? Once you say yes to website you imply having one is somehow valuable, so in that case why not spend 20 dollars.

After 20 years, her new business is mostly word of mouth, but website was very dated and potentially a minor liability.

Scope of work and urgency were so minimal that it was simply not worth the hassle to actually subscribe and then have to unsubscribe later.

If there was no free option we could have done it on my Claude sub or she would have just paid.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#142

Post by camillomiller »

bhawker wrote: post #140
bluefirebrand wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

As long as there are standards, yes, why not. In Italian we have a saying: il mondo è bello perché è vario. The world is beautiful because it’s varied.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#143

Post by pocksuppet »

toyg wrote: post #53
latchkey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context is important in a response like this. Giacomo is a Sr. Presales consultant at a SaaS company that sells "The AI operating system for modern Finance." Of course you're adverse to things because it is a direct threat to what your business offers today. If I can vibe code up a solution that fixes my problems for $200, it doesn't matter what happens in 5 years. The rate of change that's happening today in the inc…

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…

Ha! you think anyone cares about regulatory compliance? no, they only need the appearance of regulatory compliance

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#145

Post by geraneum »

ramraj07 wrote: post #106
cube00 wrote: post #96

> If you write a React component with an agent, though, then the risk of just yolo’ing it into production is (typically) much lower. If your state management gets out of sync with the form controls your users are working with it can become pretty high risk because now users see one thing and something else actually gets sent to the backend.

If your coding agent screwed up so bad that wrong data is being shown to the user, in August 2026, thats more on the prompter than anything else.

But the prompter is supposed to be someone who doesn’t know web dev. That’s their selling point.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#146

Post by othmanosx »

unshavedyak wrote: post #38
avgDev wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a blazor app in poduction, Codex made errors which it could not fix and it required me reading documentation. I won't argue that it didn't make my life simpler, tasks which would take me days are done in hours, sometimes without touching code.

Yea, i still deal with a ton of code in AI heavy workflows. If anything the frustrating part is absorbing the code quickly enough. AI (Claude for me) writes in cryptic text and the code flows can often be non-obvious. I need (and am exploring) custom review tooling to improve this AI->Human code flow. Reviewing PRs were always the hardest part for me in programming. They were often full of the developers decisions an…

I'm building https://pyor.review to fix this problem, try it out and let me know what you think.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#147

Post by gridspy »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #134
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…

> 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…

The actual problem is that no-one had considered that this (desync between front and backend) COULD happen. Once it was realized that it was possible (and worth testing) the bug was practically solved already.

Such is true for many bugs. Even if you have unit tests, they only test on things you've thought of. It's usually the stuff you haven't thought of that gets you.

No reason not to unit test of course, but don't get a false sense of complacency or assume testing is easy either. That's why it's great to do things very carefully (and probably not with AI Agents).

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#149

Post by jansan »

bhawker wrote: post #140
bluefirebrand wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Since a good LLM can handle any of those 40 web frameworks, I think having 40 web frameworks is becoming less of a problem than it used to be. Actually, implementing ideas in an individual manner will become easier. Remember the Bazaar and the Cathedral? The Bazaar kind of failed on the client side, but LLMs may revive it.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#150

Post by crabmusket »

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…

I wonder if this is overstated. Anecdotally, we use Vue at work and Claude and Codex handle it just fine. I'd expect Vue to be the third best-represented after React and Angular, but even then, we feel absolutely no need to change things up to get better results.

Vue's reactivity is quite similar to Solid's, AFAIK, so I wonder why there would be so many issues with Solid.

We have also started to have success getting LLMs to create custom lints for us to handle tricky edge cases. For example, discovering deep watches or tricky interactions - you can get a fair way asking an LLM to create a lint using a codemod library (in our case, vue-morph) that fires on this example but not on that example.

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