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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

#181

Post by lnrd »

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?…

> Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world.

Last week alone I was unable to access two major websites because their auth flow was broken (I was attempting to log in with Apple, so not "the happy path"). I was just locked out, had to contact support. I guess this mentality is what causes it.

We had safeguards and best practices built over the years of learnings to avoid introducing these kind of regressions. And we threw them away in half a year to...gain some productivity in delivering features that most likely the users don't even want.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#182

Post by sureglymop »

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…

What bothers me is that I notice it everywhere. Not only does AI have a distinct writing style, it has a distinct style of frontend UI/UX design. I notice it on more and more websites and it bores me. I want creativity and originality. I haven't really seen AI exhibit that at all. It can maybe be driven there through persistent human input but then I think it's still the human being original/creative.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#183

Post by bschwindHN »

Gigachad wrote: post #55
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…

At the same time I have found LLMs far less competent at frontend because they don't seem to have any visual understanding of what a good website looks like.

Similarly for how things feel, like animations, physics, controls, etc. That's one reason I don't think agents will be creating games anyone wants to play, any time soon (unless they just straight up copy an existing good game)

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#184

Post by totetsu »

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…

Is anyone keeping track of these .. second order effects.. of the proliferation of agents? Like this, or oss projects getting 10s of 000s of bug report, or the Linux kernel site getting ddosed by crawlers..

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#185

Post by jjgreen »

afiori wrote: post #170
altmanaltman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

A lot of the bitching about react always had the same flavour of the complaints that JavaScript dares to have a NaN To be fair it is stupid that NaN !== NaN but that is how IEEE and CPUs made floats to be

It's not stupid when you realise that NaN is not "not a number" but rather "not a particular number", this becomes clear from

  hypot(Inf, NaN)
being Inf rather than NaN

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#186

Post by ahartmetz »

shostack wrote: post #42
j4yav wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer

Being a programmer has always meant dealing with abstraction layers and climbing up the abstraction ladder. You are simply learning a new language, whose syntax happens to look like English (or whatever language you speak), but with new, undiscovered, and constantly changing design patterns and best practices.

Don't forget probabilistic.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#187

Post by netdevphoenix »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #141
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Arguably, if the website does not have a positive value and only negative, the logical thing is to shut it down and keep the Google Business profile imo. I assume she has been paying for the domain name all this years too or is it a subdomain?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#188

Post by larodi »

We gave a university class called "Advanced JS" and it was going for more than 13 years. Some years we had 30, others 50, recently more like 18 students. In 2026 though, I see very little reason to continue to do so.

What am I going to teach them? How to run Codex or CC? Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? We have always considered ourselves forward-thinking with live coding, paired programming, AI-assisted visual artefacts.

And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided we stop giving these lectures. Everyone autodidact themselves, I dont care anymore.

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