The fear I have is that everything will become the same... boring. AI will suck the soul out of everything it touches.
As if trying to make CSS behave or fixing the breakage introduced by React N+1 was the definition of fun...
The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
231–240 of 284 posts
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#232These articles make me wonder, are we driving ourselves into a local maximum of progress? If people move to React because agents know React, will the next better framework ever get traction? Extrapolate this thought to more than just front end dev, especially because we'll have fewer actual practitioners to invent the next framework. Maybe the agents will do it for us I guess?
Or another angle - will we even need a framework? Frameworks exist to give humans better a better interface for common patterns. But LLMs can find and replicate patterns all day in vanilla Javascript without getting bored or annoyed by bad ergonomics.
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Whi…
You are conflating "uses chatbots" with "likes AI," and seemingly ignoring your own link's findings that young Americans are especially negative towards it.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-does-everyone-hate-data-cen...
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#234We 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,…
Unless this is the endpoint of software engineering (React for the next thousand years?) someone’s gonna have to do the work of understanding and pushing things forward. It won’t be an agent.
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Given that my nontechnical coworker has shared quite a few of these TikToks/Google Shorts with me, yes tons of people are making them. I don’t know what kind of alternative reality you live in, you can just go to any social media site and search for “create website with ChatGPT” etc. and check the view counts. Plus the context here isn’t any random person, but people who intend to pay for website development for thei…
Given that my normie wife, normie family and normie coworkers haven't shared any such videos with me, my own anecdata seems to cancel yours out and now we're at an impasse. Perhaps you're living in an alternative reality where your nontechnical coworkers get recommended weird AI videos because of where they work and who they associate with?
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does updating the website bring in additional money?
Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?
Speaking for myself, I would not touch any professional practice sporting a slopcoded website with a ten-foot pole.
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but what about when "Claude do this" picks WordPress for someone that doesn't know what a reverse shell is?
Still a win. Claude loves to write code from scratch instead of searching the web and pulling in dependencies, so you’ll likely end up with fewer garbage tier plugins written by people whose average skill level is put to shame by bootcamp grads; those people don’t know what a reverse shell is either.
So… similar levels of garbage code, but with no eyes looking at it.
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Keyword is students, 5-10 years ago I was involved in teaching non-programmers how to develop so however people act once in the profession is irrelevant to this discussion really.
> Keyword is students
Yeah, I think this is fair, I was thinking professionally and don't have much experience of academic students in that way, from either side. Clearly feels like I misunderstood/mistook the wider context here, so thanks for the correction!
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that. Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result. But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots o…
the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that. the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic…
“the thing you haven't come to terms with…”
Why the fuck do so many people write like this nowadays? Quit acting like you have access to some sort of universal knowledge or unique insight into other people’s state of mind; it’s extremely obnoxious. You’re presumably trying to communicate with adult professionals, not children.
Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
#240Earlier 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…
> insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something. inevitable, and we cannot close our eyes about it. but okay, lets say a single asshole does not resume the whole group. then again - it is very difficult to convince anyone in 2026 (myself included!) he needs to do something in coding manually. but then again if you don't get one's hands dirty, even like...…
perhaps we'll have people late in life that will turn to coding things again by hand, for the sake of making their brain work, the way people turn to physical careers to stop the stress