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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

#171

Post by Gud »

anilgulecha wrote: post #163

> So where does this leave frontend dev education? I think this is more generally, > So where does this leave education? We need to figure this out anyway, because gpt galaxia and gpt cosmos will mean no skill is worth learning functionally. The law of 42: Any debate regarding artificial intelligence and human skill will inevitably collapse into a discussion on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Hard disagree.

The AI is a fantastic assistive tool, and in many ways it surpass my skillset as a software developer(I'm a skilled software developer, although it's not my job).

However, I do not believe I would be able to build what I'm building using LLMs, without myself having the right skills.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#172

Post by zmmmmm »

gunalx wrote: post #157
zmmmmm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vue had a good tenure as a solid #2 to React, so I think it probably has got a lot of representation in training data. Things really splitered after that but it got a good foothold.

The problem I see with vue is what vue patterns are you using. And the llms may be trained on more outdated ones more than current practices.

Agree. It wasn't as drastic but I think Vue did the 2=>3 update at an unfortunate time. They lost a lot of users along the way but they also confused a lot of the LLM training too, I am sure.

Still, I have great success with it, especially with Typescript.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#173

Post by easyThrowaway »

technion wrote: post #29
comrade1234 wrote: post #5

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's st…

Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks.

From what I've seen around it will be a WordPress website still, running some at-best-once-updated version of Divi/Elementor/WpBakery, built using their equally terrible new AI tools.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#174

Post by jonathanlydall »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #46
bayindirh wrote: post #40

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-…

You're pretty much right about the reasons.

But as for the "value of her time", despite having to wait due to the rate limits for free users, this was probably still less time consuming for her than paying someone else to make the website.

She basically just did maybe half a dozen (probably less) sessions of less than 15 minutes each. This was a very a low-priority thing for her and did it between other things and after hours, so it didn't really use up time she was likely to use productively anyway.

If she had dealt with a web designer, she would probably have used up more of her time with several back-and-forth interactions with them, which also probably would have had to be done during business hours. Chances are that ChatGPT was better at intuiting what she wanted in a case like this and gave her quicker feedback loops despite the waiting for more "free tokens".

Would $20 have been worth spending on this? Absolutely. But the scope and priority were so minimal that the hassle of doing the once-off sub was more for her than just doing little bits between other stuff. If it wasn't available for free we would have used my Claude sub or she would have just paid.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#175

Post by kozikow »

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

I've seen some websites now just serve separate md endpoint (for agents to read)

I even ended reading those instead of main "interactive" websites myself

As agents are not great at navigating react either, this will catch on and you will have what you want

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#176

Post by tonyedgecombe »

derekdahmer wrote: post #162
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.

You would prefer the company that employs you be run by AI rather than humans?

I suppose that depends on how dystopian you think current middle management is. I've had managers that were deliberately malicious, AI would almost certainly have been better in that situation.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#177

Post by jonathanlydall »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #153
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…

>If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? the problem here really, from both sides of the argument, is the assumption that humans are rational economic actors. One side assumes that it is not worth 20 dollars to update the site quickly thus she does not do it, but really for that to be true (given costs of psychologists sessions etc.) then it would not even be worth u…

I've responded to your other comment too, but regarding anyone's assumption that it's worth paying $20 to have it done quickly, but there was no urgency as it's been a thing she's been wanting to do for years.

She probably put it off because the need to actually contact other people to kick off the process was way more of an impediment than anything, whereas on a Sunday afternoon when I was visiting, we kicked off the process on a whim.

She was able to "work with" ChatGPT during after-hours and in <15-minute sessions, between her doing other things, so it's not like she was likely to have used the time productively anyway.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#178

Post by jonathanlydall »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #78
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much 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?".

In this case, because spending it was more hassle than any time she would have saved by doing so. If she had no choice, then spending it would not have been an issue.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#179

Post by leptons »

rglover wrote: post #131
leptons wrote: post #121

>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.

I honestly think specializing in front or back end is a good thing. Sure, it does help to know both, but there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. I'm full-stack leaning towards front-end, and working on a personal project I know where the back-end is lacking. The front-end is pretty great but not as great as it could be if I could focus all my skill only on front-end.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#180

Post by kypro »

sci_prog wrote: post #118
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes exactly. I think we all understood at a high-level what it was doing.

The issue I had was that it was doing a lot of weirdness like using `Object.defineProperty` to try to force an existing library to do something it wasn't suppose to do. No human would have written that code.

Although I generate most of my code with AI I still personally try to keep it understandable by a competent developer. Where as most people on my team are not good at FE so they just trust the LLM to get it right. But ultimately it just doesn't matter anymore.

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