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The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

nolanlawson.com

251–260 of 282 posts

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#251
post #207
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

> ...AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well...

The world has spoken, and it does not want "good". It just wants "good enough". The "idea-guy" got 100-fold more dangerous.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#252

I think people overestimate the effect of representation of specific programming languages or frameworks. I had Codex or Claude create simple web apps for me in Objective-Smalltalk. And it did a good job. I am pretty sure that Objective-Smalltalk web apps are so underrepresented in the training set as to be almost or even actually nonexistent.

Yep. It's not that important unless you're really just relying on one shot responses.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it.

If I can do it, others can do it, too. I even built an entire full-stack framework (w/ a custom components system + Node.js back-end), deployment system, database, and CSS framework (and now those all run my businesses). When I started, I didn't have the slightest clue beyond some basic HTML and CSS. I think people limit themselves too much trying to fit into the narrow containers of a job title/description. I get why, but it's worth asking yourself what else you're capable of beyond your job if you're eager to learn.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a codebase with a lot of math and I've both learned and implemented a bunch of things that were beyond my level before I could iterate on it with AI. Same for binary reverse engineering. On the other fixing tedious bugs by hand and typing the code in is not something I miss at all.

>beyond my level before I could iterate on it with AI So you agree that you're dependent on an LLM to do your work?

I'm also dependent on a bunch of advanced libraries and compilers I didn't write. I could reimplement them if I took years to do it but it would be a total waste of time.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#255
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,…

I would pay for such content. Do you have course notes? Have you written a book? I'd pay to get expert knowledge from... an expert! LLMs are fine, but still not replacing actual human experts IME.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#256

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.

Wow, it’s fascinating after waking up to see all this conjecture here on why she didn’t pay for the subscription. The short version, wasn’t for wanting to save money, but simply a matter of it not being worth the hassle to any of us to subscribe and then later cancel for such a small scope of work. If it was too frustrating I would have let her use my Claude sub. Also, she’d been meaning to have it updated for years,…

Not that it matters for anything—she got the work done on the free plan and was happy—but my strategy in this situation is always to subscribe and immediately cancel. The cancellation does not actually take effect until the end of your billing period. (Otherwise they'd have to refund you.)

In my head, I'm not really buying a subscription, I'm just buying one month of access. I can always decide to buy another month if I want to, but it will never be automatic.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

If you're "reluctantly using" HN, maybe you should stop because it doesn't seem healthy for you. Yes, I do have some unique insights based on decades of experience building products and businesses. People who think that AI is going to produce shit vibe code forever, deserve the decency to be warned about what is coming.

[deleted]

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#258
post #128

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.

beware! using AI for middle management is how you speedrun to dystopia. Bad Managers can be fired, good managers can manage up. on other hand, "bad" AI will remain and continue to be dystopic, and "good" AI will be killed by higher management for being not being a doormat.

C suites typically aren't middle management though.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if sarcastic but no. Check out for example this website: https://www.geofungames.com/ The functionality more or less works and the website is usable, but the design follows that "AI style". I'm not sure how else to describe it.

This is absolutely a generic AI website. Do you feel the same about one I've developed using AI? https://whistle-enterprise.com/ I think the AIslop of websites is down to the lack of vision or user journey and just going with the default which will always be generic and bland. If it does feel in the "AI style" I'd love to understand what it is.

FWIW, I clicked through a few pages and this doesn't register as AI slop to me at all.

At least, it's missing the cargo cult telltales like the beige or unreadable neon hax0r dark mode theme, that console looking font with three different sizes and tiny headings, formatting vomit with italics/bolding every other word, useless cards/animated colored dots, scrolling text, excess boilerplate text on every surface, useless generated tags/categories/chips everywhere, etc that plague the designs of the last year.

Overall it's clean and modern (and the interactive table actually has content not pointless filler). It definitely wouldn't have triggered my visceral slop reaction and therefore wouldn't bother me if I later learned the dev used AI to make it.

I can't speak for everyone, but personally my issue isn't the use of AI at all (I use it myself), the problem is being able to recognize a carbon copy Claude/Codex design in (Mostly) the same with prose. But that's playing with fire a bit because while a website/app might have a utilitarian purpose, I will have zero motivation to continue reading text I didn't prompt myself once I suspect it's from an LLM. There's just too much spam now to give benefit of the doubt unfortunately. The writing on your site doesn't scream LLM either though so I think you're good on both fronts.

It's like the saying "if you're explaining you're losing": once the seed is planted that it's AI, it's extremely hard to successfully argue your identical Claude-designed site is the exception that deserves users' limited time. Putting in some minimal thought and care in advance to avoid that first impression means fewer of those arguments with potential users experiencing slop fatigue like me. Anyway, nice job!

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#260
The threads in here really make me wonder what the endgame is for people who have surrendered to pure doomerism. Saying stuff like "ai will suck the soul out of everything" is such a defeatist standpoint to take, but I see it all the time, like authors who say AI has devalued writing and there is no reason for them to write anymore. It all kind of goes back to the classic argument that if anyone can do the thing that you think makes you special, you are no longer special. But that's not true, it is the self that makes anything you make special. If you're using AI tools to achieve your vision, then your thing is special. But it seems like the assumption is that no one cares about making good things, people will just make bad things, and everything will be ruined. That's just not true. Digital photography did not make all photographs bad, because taking a photo became too easy. Same for switching from typewriters to computers with spellcheck. I just don't really get the intense pessimism overall.

If you only liked doing the thing because other people couldn't do the thing, did you even like doing the thing to begin with? Or did you only like doing the thing because you thought it said something about you as a person? This is probably at the root of all gatekeeping behavior, really.

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