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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

#281

Post by satrerer »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #153
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years! If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost. Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising. Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing…

>If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? the problem here really, from both sides of the argument, is the assumption that humans are rational economic actors. One side assumes that it is not worth 20 dollars to update the site quickly thus she does not do it, but really for that to be true (given costs of psychologists sessions etc.) then it would not even be worth u…

We aren't even rational like, we are after the fact rationalizers.

Behavior is largely sentiment driven or random and then we invent a story after the fact to frame the behavior as "rational".

"Rationality" is when these two processes happen to line up and that happens very rarely.

We do have the right language in "economic actor" because economics itself is a type of performance. Economics is closer to theater than to chemistry. The non-performative version of economics is a hedge fund.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#282

Post by herbst »

larodi wrote: post #279
dormento wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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.

I've made websites for universities and science programs so I've got a taste of the other side, where money doesn't really matter that much and accessibility is a must.

It's hard to go back and just ignore it

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#283

Post by jplusequalt »

chpatrick wrote: post #272
jplusequalt wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Sorry, I just don't think you'd be qualified for the job if this was 5 years ago.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#284

Post by chpatrick »

jplusequalt wrote: post #283
chpatrick wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I just don't think you'd be qualified for the job if this was 5 years ago.

I had the same job 5 years ago, but I'm sure you know better.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#285

Post by hadlock »

adamredwoods wrote: post #68
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…

The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. And if something doesn't quite work out, who's the backup? For small shops and startups, this probably doesn't matter. For mission critical sites, who's more dependable? AI is a tool, that's all it is.

>The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else.

There is still a cost to the business owner, they have to find a place to hire a freelancer, interview and then explain what problem they need solved, go through several iterations with them (either via meeting or email, or both) etc etc. If you're a small business that's not setting up an online storefront, the time spent setting it up and building it yourself is possibly less time. And then there's the bigger headache: what happens when the freelancer stops returning your calls? For the average small business website/page it is 2-10 pages. The average business owner can probably crank out that site with AI in less time than setting up a single interview.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#286

Post by scotty79 »

Paradoxically, front-end is holding well enough because that's the spot in software development where taste matters the most. The models can't just rely on text processing. The models need vision, computer use, and critical artistic taste to make good front-ends.

We'll get there eventually, but later than with the rest of software development.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#287

Post by g00zzy »

latchkey wrote: post #11
throwayay4929 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI

no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing. i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written. from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid…

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Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#288

Post by [deleted] »

gridspy wrote: post #147
bluefirebrand wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image" You can though. Maybe not exactly what you are thinking but there are some pretty good image similarity algorithms like dhash out there that do stuff like this. Mostly they get used to check for duplicate uploads, copyright materials, or "does this look like porn" style filters This isn't something that needs image models…

The actual problem is that no-one had considered that this (desync between front and backend) COULD happen. Once it was realized that it was possible (and worth testing) the bug was practically solved already. Such is true for many bugs. Even if you have unit tests, they only test on things you've thought of. It's usually the stuff you haven't thought of that gets you. No reason not to unit test of course, but don't…

[deleted]

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#289

Post by saurik »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #74

"Note I’m not saying there are zero risks: the agent could mess up accessibility, it could cause an infinite loop that blocks users, etc. But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse)." This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just fo…

This same level of "oops" in the backend causes users to accidentally see or delete other user's photos, which is definitely a categorically worse scenario.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#290

Post by properbrew »

stlwtt wrote: post #259
properbrew wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, usele…

Appreciate you taking a look through!

> 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 You absolutely hit the nail on the head.

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