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The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

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Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#201

Post by whizzter »

embedding-shape wrote: post #194
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 st…

> 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?

Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes.

I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping up on basics or tedious tasks makes the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#202

Post by embedding-shape »

whizzter wrote: post #201
embedding-shape wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 st…

> 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? Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping…

> Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes.

Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Not often my real-life experience pretty much differs 180 with what I read here, but this is one of those cases.

> the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something

Yeah, this is like 50% of all the developers in the software engineering ecosystem, if not more. We're all riding the highs of past successes then extrapolate that over our entire lives and future work.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#203

Post by borzi »

gedy wrote: post #102

Maybe I'm an outlier here but I moved into front end to steer products and the resultant architecture into making sense from the incomplete or contradictory "requirements" we got from product and even UX. I've been doing this for over 20 years and every company has needed good engineers to make the product a logical reality. LLMs piping out UIs from PM prompts aren't solving that imho.

I'm a backend engineer working closely with a single frontend guy on an internal app and after creating a pr in his repo, it was immediately clear that AI can build some nice brochure sites, but UI state management, clean UX, good performance and API dispatch handling still require you to know what your doing for things to work well.

I think that frontend devs merely have to move from debating their frameworks to focusing more on user problems, maintainability, performance etc. but that is every dev right now...

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#204

Post by vrighter »

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.

the thing that allowed me to effectively climb higher in the abstraction stack, is to dive lower first.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#205

Post by wccrawford »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #65
comrade1234 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.

will not not necessarily be true for AI generated works in all territories https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49382041

If nobody owns the work, then nobody can stop you from changing it, either.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#206

Post by bryanrasmussen »

embedding-shape wrote: post #202
whizzter wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping…

> Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Not often my real-life experience pretty much differs 180 with what I read…

>Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes?

Assuming these behaviors often come from a place of insecurity then I think the normal behavior of programmers may be modified in the case they are in a university class trying to learn from a teacher, because then the programmer's natural fear of saying something and being shown to be an idiot will keep them quiet unless they are very very sure.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#207

Post by herbst »

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,…

The issue is that AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well on any kind of device, for blind people or otherwise impaired, color blind, ...

However it's not that anyone cared before otherwise AI would know better than that

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#208

Post by jojobas »

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.

Creativity and originality? Like when you try to scroll a page and it rotates an image gallery instead?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#209

Post by fmpfmp »

Gud wrote: post #171
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.

you forgot a 'yet' somewhere in the last sentence of your comment.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#210

Post by BatchJob »

The asteroid is the author and his horrible attitude towards software development. People giving in like this is an indication that they really didnt have much to offer in the first place and viewed "dev experience" as he puts it as just some way to be clever.

Also when someone says something like "I literally worked on a browser performance team", using the parlance of a middle school cheerleader to describe that work, I dont have a feeling that these experts bowing out is really going to have much impact.

In general, I have always felt UI, and UI adjacent developers to be the least serious of us and this article backs that up.

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