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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

#291

Post by larsfaye »

etoxin wrote: post #76

I was originally a Flash developer, when that died when Steve Jobs banned it from iPhones, I pivoted to frontend. I got to see web evolve over the next decade or so and loved every part of it. Now, still as a frontend engineer albeit much more senior. The writing is on the wall, again. It's time to reskill for AI. It's not bad news. We as experienced engineers are needed to help build in the guardrails, frameworks, t…

> It's time to reskill for AI.

I'm just curious, what do you think that looks like for you and for others? AI is not so much a skill as it is an interface, and one that is quite possibly one of the easiest to use that we've ever created. It is an interface for information, essentially. It's the skills that you come to the table with that determine the results that you're going to get back, and whether they're going to be quality or slop.

It sounds like what you're describing is similar to this new course that Theo Browne (ugh) and Kent C Dodds (double ugh) are launching called "mega.dev", and it appears that it's essentially just talking about the systems and tooling that's going to go into utilizing agents, and code is no longer even a topic.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#292

Post by larsfaye »

mettamage wrote: post #166
livinglist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is the nature of being a software engineer, even before AI you had to keep learning new libraries/SDKs/APIs/languages to keep up with the industry trend. I think it will remain the same in the age of AI, good engineers will adapt.

IMO the reskilling is not that hard. Leetcode and applying for jobs has been way harder. In fact, the AI reskilling has been a boon for me. Suddenly I'm able to get a job way more easily and get to call myself a senior, all of a sudden. And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time [1]. So yea, I really welcome the change. [1] What I mean with being a generalist: Did iOS dev a…

>And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time

I was just speaking with my wife about this a few days ago, that I am actually happy that I didn't specialize in one specific discipline, or rather spend my time around learning a little bit of everything, which now gives me the foothold into any direction that I want to go.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#293

Post by tuesdaynight »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #132
dsiegel2275 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant more along the lines of "This narrow problem today is not worth worrying about, because soon it will be a larger and bigger problem. "

That's still a silly argument though How about we worry about this smaller problem today so the bigger problem tomorrow is less big. Or doesn't materialize at all? Do we have to sleepwalk off this cliff?

I agree with you, but have you tried talking to people in real life about it? Almost nobody cares. If someone asks about it, I give them what I believe. I don't want them to take my words as truth, but I hope that it makes them research something, at least. If you are luck enough, 5% of people will do that, and the conversation will be possible.

Tech people give you better odds, but you still will find that most believe that AI is useless for something that you know that it's totally capable of doing. Damn, the last one I talked said that "Fable can't even do React"

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#294

Post by afiori »

jjgreen wrote: post #185
afiori wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the bitching about react always had the same flavour of the complaints that JavaScript dares to have a NaN To be fair it is stupid that NaN !== NaN but that is how IEEE and CPUs made floats to be

It's not stupid when you realise that NaN is not "not a number" but rather "not a particular number", this becomes clear from hypot(Inf, NaN) being Inf rather than NaN

NaN means only NaN, 0/0 is NaN at the cpu level.

to my weak undestanding only pow and hypot behave like this; pow for math reasons and i could guess that hypot does that to sorta have |x| <= hypot(x,y)

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#295

Post by afiori »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #213
afiori wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the bitching about react always had the same flavour of the complaints that JavaScript dares to have a NaN To be fair it is stupid that NaN !== NaN but that is how IEEE and CPUs made floats to be

I mean to me the whole point of NaN is that it should not equal NaN, so it seems sort of like you are making the complaint in the first sentence in your second sentence, only in a slightly more abstracted way. Unless you are of the opinion there is another better point to NaN? funny story, I was once interviewing for a job where the tech guy did not know that NaN existed. I guess JavaScript wasn't his language, but n…

my point is that that a lot of people shit on js for having "weird crazy stuff in it" and then the example is 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 !== 0.3 or NaN != NaN which has nothing to do with js semantics

JS is weird, and not having a stronger separation between ints and floats makes NaNs more common than in other languages (eg parseInt would not return NaNs in C or python) but for many "weird" examples people are making fun of normal stuff.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#296

Post by arvinsim »

camillomiller wrote: post #142
bhawker wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the world need the "uniqueness" of 40 similar web frameworks?

As long as there are standards, yes, why not. In Italian we have a saying: il mondo è bello perché è vario. The world is beautiful because it’s varied.

Imagine if we have 40 variants of assembly. Would software development have developed at the same pace?

Personally for me, I am much less interested in the implementation in frontend and more interested in performance, accessibility, responsiveness, etc.

Frontend frameworks are just means to an end. If we can standardize to one, then I will have more time to focus on the more important parts.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#297

Post by hollowturtle »

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.

Did you need ai to hold together a bunch of paragraphs and a table really? holy moly

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#298

Post by properbrew »

hollowturtle wrote: post #297
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.

Did you need ai to hold together a bunch of paragraphs and a table really? holy moly

Thank you, the fact that's all you picked up on makes me very happy.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#299

Post by p32929 »

The part that matches my experience: generation was never the bottleneck at the low end.

I maintain a free open-source React portfolio template on GitHub. For years, almost none of the questions I got were "how do I change the layout". They were "how do I get this online", "why is my GitHub Pages build 404ing", "how do I point my domain at it", and six months later "I forgot how to edit it".

LLMs collapse the authoring cost to roughly zero, which is genuinely new. But the deploy/domain/keep-it-alive tail is untouched, and that is where a non-technical person still stalls. The zip-file-sent-to-a-relative step in the top comment is that tail being absorbed by unpaid favours rather than eliminated.

So I doubt the floor disappears. It moves. Nobody pays for the HTML any more; people still pay for "make it exist at a URL and keep existing".

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