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

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

#131

Post by panny »

>writing all code by hand

This is now officially a pet peeve of mine. I don't write code "by hand" I write code "by brain." A craftsman who does something "by hand" actually needs manual skills to produce that carved wood thing. Even if you know what you want and know what it looks like, you need skill with your hands to make it happen.

Software is not like this. I don't need typing skill, the IDE autocompletes most of it for me. I think about what I want and it becomes reality. If you were using a bare text editor and typing out getters and setters your whole career, sorry, you were just doing it wrong. No wonder you love AI.

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

#133

Post by watwut »

customguy wrote: post #116
aspenmartin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that historical content and code still exists right?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 the…

> 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.

I dont think it will be "too late" by any reasonable definition. All those things are learnable and companies that will really need to overcome it, will. But, they wont be open with their knowledge. Learning/training will be expensive and once people acquire it, they wont share it like open sources and programming tech blogs did.

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

#134

Post by acedTrex »

knuckleheads wrote: post #45
trjordan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Every "we're losing our craft" article has the same gloomy shape. That's enough of a bummer, but they also argue against themselves halfway through. This one, for instance: > But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through. Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical…

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

Ya it's definitely been an ongoing process. LLMs have just accelerated it.

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

#135

Post by acedTrex »

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'…

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

No it's not, its the opposite actually its very bad and leads to far far more noise in the system to sort through to find value as someone who's competent.

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

#136

Post by mcmcmc »

emodendroket wrote: post #90
mcmcmc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More people building things is straightforwardly good I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?

Suppose the choice is between software that does what you want, but isn't very optimized, and the software not existing at all, rather than between shoddy and beautiful software that both do what you want, and maybe it will make more sense to you.

So apply a false dichotomy and it will all make sense? Still not buying it. Not everything needs to be solved with software, and brushing off negative externalities as “not very optimized” is irresponsible

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

#137

Post by kakugawa »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #104
m132 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can somewhat see your point, but it is generally accepted that a wrong ARIA is worse than none, and LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing, the more decent ones heavily emphasize in-depth human code reviews. If our hypothetical developer hasn't used any accessibility-related tags before, what chance is there that those parts of the website will receive adequate testing?

Testing is an even more powerful subject here since we barely do it. Testing is so hard that we'll agree that, e.g., TDD is great (e.g. ensure your tests actually test something, ensure your code is testable from the start) yet we never do it. And when we do write tests, we are on the hook to be eternally vigilant that they are not stale, that they test something real, that they are not redundant. And they often turn…

a11y testing is non-trivial. axe-core can automatically detect many types of issues. However, enough compliance (to avoid being sued) needs end-to-end testing and human judgement. e.g. keyboard traps, focus restoration, alt-text, etc.

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

#138

Post by classified »

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'…

Each time you say that an LLM "understands" something better than you do, you also say that you're not actually qualified to judge the LLM's understanding.

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

#139

Post by acedTrex »

emodendroket wrote: post #90
mcmcmc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More people building things is straightforwardly good I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?

Suppose the choice is between software that does what you want, but isn't very optimized, and the software not existing at all, rather than between shoddy and beautiful software that both do what you want, and maybe it will make more sense to you.

I will pick the software not existing at all every time. Easily without a thought.
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