I'm allegedly a fullstack dev, often working on fullstack features, but I haven't had to think deeply about much on the frontend all year. 90% of my thought/work goes into backend work. The AIs just handle the FE stuff easily based on our existing patterns. Not saying it's perfect or can't be improved, but it pretty much always "just works" perfectly well enough.
Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
141–150 of 352 posts
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is largely accidental complexity. Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem. Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other c…
>that has to deal with the other constraints of the web platform. Well there's your problem right there
Right - but those constraints are inherent to the medium. Like basically unconstrained screen sizes from large desktops to mobile, with the user free to resize anywhere in between (and can't be constrained in the way that 'real' apps often are). Input methods of both fine mouse control, and course touch.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 decrea…
> Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem?
Contrary to what you seem to believe, cars and bicycles are different kinds of things, not two versions of the same fundamental type, so this rhetorical question doesn't make much sense (consider that also your legs provide the function of transportation but are nevertheless not a kind of car).
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#144> Just like AI is deskilling programming now, JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand.
What does he mean by this? What skills were lost? Writing HTML templates?
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend. The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for thi…
I would much rather have software that works but lacks accessibility features than software that's broken but also has some broken accessibility features sprinkled in. The former is useful to many people, while the latter is useful to no one.
But the key here is: LLMs don't have latent rigor, nor any other kind of rigor.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#146I'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 I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?
Depends upon the filtering system.
Consider indie games. If there are 10 of them and 5 are great, you don't need any filter. You look through 5 great and 5 not so great games and end up with 5 great ones.
Now go to a world where indie games explode. But only 1 in every 100 are great. There are now 100,000 games, but most qualify as very low quality. There are now 1,000 great games (and a few of these might be the perfect game you dreamt of), but if you don't have a filter and are buried under 10s of thousands of horrible games, things feel worse.
With a filter, you now live in a world where you can easily find most of those great games with only a few lower quality ones showing up. So as long as the filters that exist, whatever they might be, can handle it, more is better even if quality drops.
Unless the quality extremely fast, say my previous example of 100,000 games but only 1 in a million was a great game. I think this level of quality drop is extremely unlikely. Instead, I suspect the real problem is if the filters can keep up, because they depend upon human effort, so it is possible to hit a point where they are overwhelmed and stop functioning properly. That's when things get worse. As long as the filters hold, more building leads to better outcomes even with a drop in quality.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am not joking when I say that software craftsmen lost the war when tabs vs spaces was obviated as a point of contention by CI enforced formatting and linting around broader community standards.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#148Honestly I think what is missing is not developers but designers. Or, I should say, designers hired to create competent designs that serve people well and not to instead manipulate users. If you want better front ends - get more and better designers! As for front-end code, I don't expect to ever write a line of that again in my life.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#149> Just like AI is deskilling programming now, JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade.
Not to be rude but this person doesn't understand the fundamentals of the topic they're discussing.
Frameworks just give patterns and abstractions to build a front-end, but you still have to actually know how to use those things to build a UI. You still have to know HTML, CSS, and JS (assuming you want to do it well, not just slap some junk together). Even with AI, unless you're comfortable shipping a half-working UI, just like programming: sorry dude, you still need to know your shit.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#150Earlier 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…
This is super hilarious :-))) Do you think creating the orders of magnitude of content the internet produced organically and which LLM creators are stealing is cheap? If they actually have to pay for content creation while competing with content creators on the you know, content creation front via LLM-generation, the entire business model of LLMs collapses. You can't have the mountains of data needed for LLMs in the…
It’s literally how these models are trained today. They of course use open source data but that’s no longer the most important source, it’s high quality prompts and verifiable tests and a lot of inference compute. They also have massive flywheels from users from which they can mine good data or at the very least again good prompts which can be just as important.