Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

mastrojs.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 352 posts

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#111

Post by jeremyjh »

berkes wrote: post #103
kangalioo wrote: post #46

The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is w…

> a common-sense mental model for web development. You are contradicting yourself. Either its a "minefield...of edge cases..." Or it's a common-sense model. Not both. I'm convinced we're still in this minefield of edge cases, not in a situation where we've solved all this, and where the tech to build "frontend" is clean, predictable, free of historical baggage etc etc etc. All we have done, is plaster over these foun…

No, they are saying that the frameworks and tools discussed in TFA have made it look coherent. For the most part we have not worried about compatibility for a decade. All abstractions leak a bit but in practice it holds up quite well, well worth the cost savings and flexibility for many apps.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#112

Post by jeremyjh »

ActionHank wrote: post #108
kangalioo wrote: post #46

The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is w…

I think your ignorance is showing. There is far more to it than all that. I've interviewed far too many nextjs experts who couldn't do anything else. That's not a skill, that's just knowledge, which at this point is freely available.

Right, they have no knowledge and yet they can get shit done that is good enough for many use cases. That is precisely the point.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#113

Post by PaulHoule »

Sometimes I think the techniques we used to build complex user interfaces in HTML without AJAX or DOM manipulation back in the early 2000s are effectively lost, like the techniques used to build the pyramids: insofar as younger full-stack developers have been "deskilled" many of them think you need Javascript to, say, validate forms.

Once you are using AJAX and manipulating the DOM the complexity of asynchronous communication is going to lead to something of a similar magnitude as React. Sure you can write

   document.title="A new title"
and not have to bring in but even if you think of front end as "just" updating the UI when data comes in from the server a complex application may need to update several bits of the UI and at some point you need to create some kind of communication or state management bus that handles that. Could it have been done differently? Sure.

If there's something wrong with the Reactisphere it isn't that it creates an abstraction which other abstractions live on, but these are leaky abstractions. You could use something like Bootstrap or MUI without understanding CSS if you are making something very simple and don't care what it looks like (don't have a marketing team who cares what it looks like!) but to do pro-level work you can put in front of customers you have to understand HTML, CS, JS and all the the frameworks used in your project.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#114

Post by ptx »

The article compares LLMs to Stack Overflow and calls it "a continuation of the same trend", but I think there's a big difference.

With Stack Overflow, you got multiple answers from different people with different viewpoints and different approaches, each consistent within itself. You could figure out where the author of each answer was coming from and judge whether they seemed to know what they were talking about. You could weigh the trade-offs and merits of the different answers against each other.

With LLMs, you get a single mushy pile of slop, not grounded in any person's actual experience or judgement. It might pretend to offer different perspectives, but it can't really, so it's much harder to evaluate.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#116

Post by customguy »

aspenmartin wrote: post #97
oblio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? And if everyone bunkers up and all that open content dries up starting in 2026, let's say, what happens?

Well that historical content and code still exists right? Are you just saying “what if we’re in a world of walled gardens now that OSS dies because people don’t want their work stolen” in which case: these companies will get data and they don’t need OSS anymore. It’s already webcrawled or licensed or commissioned, they pay people to generate novel traces when they need it or at the very least sets of prompts and test…

That sounds like it would reduce the blazing progress of the last decades to a snail's pace, some twilight where software is just average, as it always was and always will be. That people will always do the thing the opposite of which is now incentivized doesn't convince me, basically. If just using the LLM gets you ahead in a time of severe pressure, then most people will do that, and by the time anyone realizes they kinda need a FEW people to actually be able to reason about something from start to finish, it might be to late.

We're not such a smart species. It's not like we managed so far. We're just adding unsolved problems, and distract ourselves with even bigger problems. The world could have been fed and clothed by the mid 20th century and we could have solved climate change by the 1980s (talking out of my ass here but with confidence in my general point with that), but instead we now throw everything into the furnace. in the hopes it will create a deus ex machina, like in that very bad Isaac Asimov story. I think we are absolutely capable of lobotomizing ourselves (as a species) like a toddler playing with an electrical socket shocking itself. I don't say this to be snarky, I honestly think we're that unserious and ignorant about what we do and the environment we do it in.

But I also really should look into what you answered about LLM learning from themselves, I heard it mentioned before but I still have no real clue. I will try to rectify that. I mean, I really, really want to be wrong on this, only a monster wouldn't.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#117

Post by fantasizr »

neuroblaster wrote: post #82
fantasizr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone had a chance to learn vanilla js from the mozilla docs but using jquery was much much simpler. Concede that jquery is more difficult than prompting. The issue for me is that prompting a front end and everything looks exactly the same. More cookie cutter than what wordpress and wix offered

Right. So we are stuck with the jquery and wordpress forever. Because this is THE cookie cutter and it's good enough. But situation was exactly the same before the AI. You would still get your wordpress, your React frontend and Java Spring backend. AI doesn't change anything, it just takes the job of a poor slopper who made a living by coding React frontends. Anthropic just took their job, that's it, and you don't se…

Oh don't me wrong, it's bad and we're going to suffer through terrible web apps for the foreseeable future spat out in the 1000s per day. Like all slop songs, images, videos and articles. Hardly a reward for building something artisanal in the digital space

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#118

Post by watwut »

kristianc wrote: post #77
oblio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? And if everyone bunkers up and all that open content dries up starting in 2026, let's say, what happens?

It won't happen, for two reasons. One is that great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway. Finer grained controls over opt-outs would be great (the equivalent of a search engine 'nofollow' would be great and will hopefully come with time). Many kinds of technology faced this kind of tragedy of the commons a…

It will happen and it already started to happen. It started to happen even before LLM, when google started to hide smaller personal blogs in its search result. Expectation of the monetary reward has nothing to do with it, discoverability does. Culture of creating content does not exist when people cant see what others created and know no one will see what they created. A lot of smaller open source was monkey see monkey do thing - we have seen other open source projects and wanted something like that. Likewise with tutorials, we have seen other people write cool tutorials and felt like creating own and showing it out.

That is not the dynamic with LLM. You see LLM output, but original creator is hidden. And if you write your own, no one will find it. Worst, other people will tell you "LLM could have write it" in reaction ... so people wont bother.

> search engines copied and indexed web pages

Notably, search engines sent people toward web pages. And when search engines stopped doing that and started to copy content, those original pages started to die out.

> Printing presses copied manuscripts

Printing press made dissemination easier. It is an equivalent of early internet, not of LLM.

> open-source software was incorporated into commercial products

Commercial product using open source library had different user then the library it is using. And crucially, it is not hiding that library from the library user.

> Wikipedia repackaged knowledge produced elsewhere

Yes, and we collectively create less encyclopedias. They are not worth writing and checking for correctness anymore, so we don't do that all that much anymore.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#119

Post by toyetic »

I'm not entirely convinced the framework comparison holds.

In the case of frameworks ( and higher level programming languages ) you are operating at a new layer of abstraction with the specific intent to hide the lower level, that's the whole point of the framework.

LLM's don't actually move the abstraction layer. You're still coding in react/python/whatever high level language. Yes you can generate the code using natural language but you still need to understand what's being generated, verify its correctness, and reason about the system it fits into. LLMs don't hide anything they produce the code you otherwise would've written and hand it to you to review.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#120

Post by carlosjobim »

m132 wrote: post #26
kristianc wrote: post #10

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acce…

> As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable".

Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem?

> The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality

If you have 10 people eating steak and 10 people starving, then giving rice to the starving people would also sharply decrease dinner quality.

AI software is not the difference between good or bad, it's the difference between something or nothing.

Post reply on HN