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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

#261

Post by tonic_note »

People have been saying AI will come for the front ends first and yet, at my company, 100% of the BE is generated. They do not write a single line of code by hand. Yet every FE has to do the last mile of UI by hand, because the models still cannot replicate a figma spec with perfect accuracy.

Now mind you the FEs will still be cooked in the end because Eng leadership is overwhelmingly tilted towards backend devs, who will protect their own. I think we'll end up seeing a lot of janky UIs because most backends find the act of polish and pixel perfection beneath them and they'll increasingly be doing more FE work.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#262

Post by tonic_note »

sdcfgy wrote: post #198

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. Al…

A huge aspect people miss about being a good FE is product sensibility. There is inherently some overlap between what an FE does and a designer does - think about how the product should behave. If you just hand the FE over to an LLM you will get the lowest common denominator UX. It will "get the job done" (hopefully) but it will never feel great to use, because figuring out what makes a product great to use request empathy, imagination, and experience, things that apathetic front ends lack. The AI can make an excellent frontend, but only if told what to do and what to look for. It will miss a ton of UX best practices unless explicitly prompted.

This is why I find the contempt for frontend engineering so maddening. It's based on such a shallow understanding of what the job actually is. It's so much more than just "make it look pretty"

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#263

Post by leptons »

rglover wrote: post #253
leptons wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

Just because someone can code front-end doesn't mean they can design good UX. One of the "full-stack" devs I work with who started as a back-end dev thinks rewriting a full WYSIWYG front-end system is fine to replace with a series of unstyled input boxes. He's pretty clueless about what our users want. He's asking me to explain to him why his solution is worse, when it should be extremely obvious. While he can code front-end, he doesn't really "get it" at all.

I've seen this way too often across my career.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#264

Post by stlwtt »

archagon wrote: post #239
latchkey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seriously, I'm constantly seeing lines like "you're going to be left behind", "this is your fear talking", "keep lying to yourself", "enjoy it while it lasts", etc. What is it about AI that made people start talking like Marvel supervillains?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#265

Post by latchkey »

stlwtt wrote: post #264
archagon wrote: post #239

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.

Seriously, I'm constantly seeing lines like "you're going to be left behind", "this is your fear talking", "keep lying to yourself", "enjoy it while it lasts", etc. What is it about AI that made people start talking like Marvel supervillains?

archagon is anti-ai, no longer works in tech, and hasn't written code in a long while. he's responded to my comment below with something very angry and hateful, and then deleted it. i get the email notifications though, so i saw it.

for those of us who have been coding non-stop for decades, it has made me fall in love with code again. i'm excited, based on personal experience about something that is truly revolutionary. why shouldn't i talk about it with praise and go up against the doubters who are just angry and aren't putting the same level of effort in?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#266

Post by archagon »

latchkey wrote: post #265
stlwtt wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I'm constantly seeing lines like "you're going to be left behind", "this is your fear talking", "keep lying to yourself", "enjoy it while it lasts", etc. What is it about AI that made people start talking like Marvel supervillains?

archagon is anti-ai, no longer works in tech, and hasn't written code in a long while. he's responded to my comment below with something very angry and hateful, and then deleted it. i get the email notifications though, so i saw it. for those of us who have been coding non-stop for decades, it has made me fall in love with code again. i'm excited, based on personal experience about something that is truly revolutiona…

Here is the comment I deleted:

“Same to you. You’re all over this thread with smug comments and cheap snipes. Why are you even here? Are you gaining anything at all from this discussion?

There are loads and loads of people on this site with decades of experience building products and businesses. Don’t talk down to them.”

I deleted it because, in my haste, I did not have time to fully vet the first paragraph. Other than that, I stand by my words on basic netiquette 100%. If this comes off as “very angry and hateful,” you may be a bit sheltered.

As for the grandparent comment, my personal feeling is that this type of rhetoric stems from insecurity and/or contagion from the deluge of AI corp propaganda we’re all drowning in. No previous technological advance elicited this sort of persistent cheerleading — not smartphones, nor the internet, nor personal computing itself. (There was no need for it: you just used the new thing and if it worked, then it worked, QED.)

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#267

Post by chowells »

wredcoll wrote: post #90
chowells wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nothing at all how like C runs on top of assembly. C has semantics. Code means something without ever being run. You can check in your source code and (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. Try checking in only your prompts and nothing else. Just the…

> (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. > See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code I mean... yes, but also no. C is actually a great example. So…

No. C is a language with a specification independent of implementation. If you write correct C code (according to the specification, which no one does), it does not depend on any of those factors. C is almost uniquely bad in terms of accepting broken programs and just compiling them differently. But that doesn't change the fact that the language has semantics, even if most code that violates the documented preconditions those semantics depend on.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#268

Post by latchkey »

archagon wrote: post #266
latchkey wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

archagon is anti-ai, no longer works in tech, and hasn't written code in a long while. he's responded to my comment below with something very angry and hateful, and then deleted it. i get the email notifications though, so i saw it. for those of us who have been coding non-stop for decades, it has made me fall in love with code again. i'm excited, based on personal experience about something that is truly revolutiona…

Here is the comment I deleted: “Same to you. You’re all over this thread with smug comments and cheap snipes. Why are you even here? Are you gaining anything at all from this discussion? There are loads and loads of people on this site with decades of experience building products and businesses. Don’t talk down to them.” I deleted it because, in my haste, I did not have time to fully vet the first paragraph. Other th…

Since you decided to delete your anger filled post, I’ll respond privately.

I genuinely wish you the best.

Best,

Jon

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#269

Post by jplusequalt »

chpatrick wrote: post #254
jplusequalt wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>I'm also dependent on a bunch of advanced libraries and compilers I didn't write.

Two different kinds of dependence here: one is taking advantage of a pre-existing tool to perform some set of tasks. The other is there to outsource your thinking over concepts you are not able to reason about yourself.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#270

Post by jplusequalt »

kolinko wrote: post #41
jplusequalt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Typing the code was never the interesting part. But solving hard problems and developing systems intuition was. If you're trying to tell me that people working on code bases predominantly written by AI are still solving hard problems themselves, or understand the systems the AI is building, I think they're lying to themselves.

From what I’ve seen they get to the level of understanding of systems way faster than we did because they iterate and experiment with this from day one. We had to spend years understanding code syntax, and other minutia. Also, you need a different kind of toolset/skillset to grok a system that was vibe coded all the way - different failure scenarios. Older devs tend to just say “see, I told you, it’s just spaghetti u…

>and the newer gen learns to work with that spaghetti.

All this really means is using more AI to cover up their blind spots. Don't flatter them.

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