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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

#271

Post by sureglymop »

properbrew wrote: post #228
sureglymop wrote: post #215

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.

This is much better but I can still tell. But I'm sure you guided it a lot to arrive at this state. Surely people with less care are one shotting and publishing boring websites.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#272

Post by chpatrick »

jplusequalt wrote: post #269
chpatrick wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm also outsourcing computational geometry to CGAL and CPU optimizations to GCC, so what? I can still reason about them.

For example for a problem I had recently Claude pointed out (after some prodding for me) that the determinant of the Jacobian of a function I'm interested in is a polynomial in polar coordinates, so I used a fancy root finding library (which I also didn't write) to solve it efficiently.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#273

Post by graemep »

kozikow wrote: post #175
CqtGLRGcukpy wrote: post #108

There is going to come one day that companies (and any website owner) will wish they didn't use AI and instead used a simple (maybe even plain-text) website. That will come when people really need information from that website but can't get to it. https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performan... Discussion regarding that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734

I've seen some websites now just serve separate md endpoint (for agents to read) I even ended reading those instead of main "interactive" websites myself As agents are not great at navigating react either, this will catch on and you will have what you want

How do you find these?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#274

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #81

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.

The CEO takes their orders from the board of directors representing shareholder or directly from the owner(s) of the business. Even if such a thing as an AI CEO were possible, you somehow think the owners/shareholders are going to command the AI CEO to be any less profit focused and efficiency focused? An AI CEO would have even less qualms about doing benefit cutbacks, layoffs, and squeezing employees because it's just a LLM in a trench coat.

If you want to fight businesses, you need to have some kind of a clue how they work.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#275

Post by josephg »

wiseowise wrote: post #158
josephg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontend development - perhaps more than any other kind of software development - is “what you see is what you get”. There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken. Systems engineering isn’t like that. Vibe coders beware: A database could silently corrupt data, or have latent security vulnerabilities. It might have a badly designed query language that will be difficult to change later. But frontend code…

> Systems engineering isn’t like that. Whatever lets you sleep at night man. If you really think you’re better than the machine at spotting arcane Unix incompatibilities, or that you’re somehow more “safe” than frontend jockeys, I’ve got really bad news for you.

Are you replying to the right comment? I didn’t say any of that.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#276

Post by jojobas »

sureglymop wrote: post #215
jojobas wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

I don't know. The website does what it needs to and doesn't do anything to annoy me.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#277

Post by josephg »

Supermancho wrote: post #122
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken." ??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states. I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."

No need to engage with bad faith premises. You cant convince someone who is invested in their own FUD.

What bad faith premises?

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#278

Post by larodi »

belmarca wrote: post #255
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,…

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.

Here the notes and materials from stuff written during the two classes - Advanced JS and JS frameworks

https://github.com/FMIjs

You can tell the year of distinct repos. There are no slides as we adopted the mathematical approach of writing live and solving as we progress in order to demonstrate the thought process.

This is not a complete snapshot of all discussed in the classes, but is a comprehensive history of what I claim we did.

There is still a chance we give it one more time in 2026/2027. At least one team member already dropped out, perhaps a second also. I’m considering with the other leading person whether to continue. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#279

Post by larodi »

dormento wrote: post #251
herbst wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is questionable on how many occasions the world ever wanted more than ‘good enough’. And it is apparent from all the half baked systems we use daily how much this is actually true and how little software excellence matters in a real world scenarios where deadlines and costs are forcing dubious decisions every day.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#280

Post by znpy »

comrade1234 wrote: post #5

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's st…

Yeah i have a similar experience. I’m essentially a sysadmin and i don’t do much programming and i always kept myself as far as possible from frontend development.

And yet now with AI (chatgpt codex in my case) i can make useful little apps without ever looking at what kind of html/javascript gets generated.

I’ll be honest: my agents.md explicitly states to use vanilla javascript and plain bootstrap for frontend, in case i might have to look at it in the future, but so far i’ve never had that need.

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