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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

#191

Post by cheesecakegood »

georgemcbay wrote: post #86
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #19

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…

I do get the sentiment for sure.

Personally though? I’ve made peace with the fact that I might have a 20/month subscription indefinitely. It’s slowly working its way towards being like a cell phone or Internet bill, although there’s reason to hope that the amount might decrease over time eventually.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#192

Post by cheesecakegood »

nozzlegear wrote: post #110
oefrha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idiot can spend one minute now to acquire this amazing knowledge that you can just ask ChatGPT “I need a website”. If they don’t know now, sooner or later they’ll know from a short TikTok or something in the next couple of months/years. Not to mention AI companies are spending $$$ on ads to raise awareness; professionals already know they can create slides with LLMs, literally nothing’s different when it comes to…

You're not accounting for how deeply unpopular AI is with the general public. Would anyone be making those TikTok videos in the first place? Would OP's wife want to use AI if he wasn't there to advocate it?

AI is not deeply unpopular, that’s just nonsense. The complaint ratio is just relatively high from a loud minority. Don't believe me? Just check Pew.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...

It’s true that about half of all adults overall never use chatbots, but it’s not out of a negative perception, it’s largely just lack of interest with a side of privacy concerns and inaccuracy concerns. While people do tend to think AI will eventually be a net negative in society, this isn’t like an overwhelming feeling and opinions on the impact to themselves personally is less strong, not more.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#193

Post by jonathanlydall »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #187
jonathanlydall wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the new version is a net positive value as creates a better "vibe" to prospective patients than just a Google Business listing would, and I expect will age well.

The domain's used for email anyway and is on a very cheap local hosting plan, probably all-in-all like ZAR 84 per month and ZAR 200 per year for the domain, so ZAR ~1200 (USD ~75) per year.

Old website was built in a different era, Google Business didn't exist, "HTML5" wouldn't be a thing for another 5 years, web design styles were completely different and was before iPhone meaning that modern day "mobile friendly" was not even a thought.

When my father started running guest suites over 10 years-ago I made a single page website with essentially the same goals but using a Hugo template. The website still feels "modern" today, so I expect this new one of my mother's will age well too.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#194

Post by embedding-shape »

larodi wrote: post #188

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,…

> 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

Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating?

Personally, I felt similarly once the people I'm mentoring started using CC and Codex and similar stuff, as a lot of the questions they asked me were easily answerable by the agent, so I guess I had a brief moment of "But what value do I even provide in the world anymore?".

I ended up kind of restructuring what I'm trying to teach, and instead of getting them more exposed to the mechanics of software engineering, I've started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, all still related to software engineering of course, but I basically try to ask myself what I can teach them that no agent/model could, and do that stuff.

I even started introducing mentees to each other (not sure why I didn't before but alas), and have them collaborate on projects together, and figure out what works/not in collaborations with others, as no model can teach you that, as just another example. It's surfacing a whole new host of issues to work through, so seems to work fine :)

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#195

Post by crnkofe »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

Being a programmer in the era of AI now means configuring the AI and run environments to produce the sought result, than manipulating the code itself. It's like how C runs on top of assembly.

Lots of people mention this higher abstraction level but its not really the case. C has a grammar. You write C and get C as output. Assembly is hidden from the user. Natural language also has a grammar ("sort of"). You write prose into your preferred cli/app of choice BUT it outputs code in C or other language. So its basically a code generator. A code generator is not even remotely a form of abstraction. Its just a facade that breaks down as soon as the generator fails to produce a meaningful result.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#196

Post by embedding-shape »

sureglymop wrote: post #182
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.

You'll get used to everything looking the same, this always goes in cycles and we're bound for it correcting itself shortly. In the past, we had this for web 2.0, Bootstrap, Tailwind (right before LLMs) and now LLMs, it all starts to look the same, then people get tired of it and everything looks unique and novel, until people get bored of that and a new unified design language starts to spread again, leading everything to look the same...

It's all just cycles, seemingly forever, judging by the last ~20-30 years.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#197

Post by austin-cheney »

Hasn't poor training always been the status quo? It's not just the front end, and its not just JavaScript. It's the web application space in a more general sense, because I am also looking at all those Java developers maintaining legacy web applications.

In fact this reminds me of my last face to face interview. The employer wants to stand up a new enterprise SAAS solution from scratch in TypeScript to rid themselves of a costly venture. The idea is absolutely solid and the financials make complete sense on both ends. But... Supposedly there is an urgent need to fill that position and yet months later the position is still there and vacant.

The problem is that there are exceptionally few people who can write original applications from the ground up in JavaScript/TypeScript in the world of corporate employment. Yes, yes, there are trillion fantastic open source applications written in these technologies, but businesses just can't do it. Secondly, the compounding factor, is that they don't know how to interview for it because almost nobody in the corporate employment space knows what it looks like to write an original application.

That is not a technology problem. Its an institutional and culture failure and it isn't new. In the web space if you want to be a real programmer you do it for free on your own time because your employed time is prioritized with putting text on screen like a beginner.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#198

Post by sdcfgy »

I worked for web SaaS companies for a long time because money. I saw this coming when React came along. No one knows or cares about the whole stack. Training adapts to the market. Knowledge is lost.

I got out before this. My new role since 2020 doesn’t go near the front end. I don’t know anything about React. I don’t know what the state of the art is on the front end. I have actually come to despise the “new” web. Alas so have our customers in recent years because the user interfaces are generally a lot less suited to LOB applications. Everything is too large, too generic, no visual cues, nothing works with the keyboard. Now everyone is building swathes of this stuff because LLMs can crank out new user interface fast. Our endpoints have multiplied, ROI has declined.

I had a customer the other day say they wish we still distributed our Visual Basic application as it was much simpler and easier to use. That was a real eye opener for me.

This is the asteroid we need to keep an eye on.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#199

Post by gnz11 »

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…

That only works if viable alternatives exist, the moats aren’t too large and users have the freedom to switch. For example, Reddit was a viable alternative to Digg at the time, Facebook was a viable alternative to MySpace. Enterprise software has some truly grotesque UI but the user doesn’t have the freedom to switch and the moats are enormous.
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