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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?

#151

Post by skydhash »

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…

> Meanwhile, AI is happy to write tests, do red-green TDD cycles, refactor them, prune them, update them, justify and defend them. It will even incidentally write tests for the most aloof vibe-coder by accident because they didn't specify otherwise.

I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable? Why? because of all the mocks and scenarios that didn’t matter. And on top of that, tests are additional code to maintain.

These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden. I focus on integration test (whole modules) and if I have the time, on a harness to do e2e testing.

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

#152

Post by estetlinus »

> Just like artisans and craftsmen that were replaced by assembly line workers more than a century ago

Do you really need to go that far back for a comparison? We no longer need human computers to perform tedious calculations, or typists to draft and distribute correspondence.

The simplification of frontend development was never a final state. It has always been continuously evolving through abstraction and automation.

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

#153

Post by carlosjobim »

sevenzero wrote: post #38
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'…

>...and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make. It depends. My country (Germany) introduced accessibility laws recently which enforces you to build everything public with accessibility in mind. If a page doesn't meet the expected standard you can get extremely high fines.

That makes a lot of sense! I suppose that BMW has been fined billions for making motorcycles that blind people can't drive safely?

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

#154

Post by jonathanlydall »

customguy wrote: post #15
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'…

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well. No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then? > More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make. That I agree with. The more the me…

The successful standards, platforms, libraries, tools, etc. will be the ones that LLMs can understand. Like a good GitHub readme, or website, or Discord community, I strongly feel that making sure you've (perhaps personally) written enough about your offering for AI to understand it will be an important factor in how successful it can be in markets or communities.

I wrote a similar HN comment around this yesterday, but the short version is that we found for our product that the years of investment in our Docs (which were seemingly never good enough) are now paying enormous dividends in that LLMs seem to understand our product really well. This has manifested in the LLM in our product being highly effective and a few additional clients who found us through AI chats. Turns out the problem with our Docs wasn't so much with their content, but rather that people just weren't looking at them much.

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

#155

Post by renegade-otter »

sevenzero wrote: post #87
lqet wrote: post #71

This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS…

On the other hand, using frameworks later on was a good attempt to standardize things. Having some homegrown GUI nobody knows how to work with isn't an advantage either. Personally I refuse things that "feel" too big (Nuxt/Next), but like Vue... Currently though, I want to get rid of most Javascript so I'll work my way to HTMX or Alpine type solutions with server side templates. Personally the less tech I use the bet…

+1 for HTMX+ Alpine.

Ironically, this goes well with LLMs, where you can nail down the patterns and then the clanker can follow them. There is nothing wrong with using clankers for fast typing.

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

#156

Post by wiseowise »

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

Is it? More than a decade ago there was a Cambrian explosion of software, Flash alone was the defining force of indie gaming industry. And now what? We have so much shit/shovelware that nobody wants to touch with a ten-foot pole.

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

#158

Post by wiseowise »

mcmcmc wrote: post #65
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 I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?

Infinite monkeys with typewrites theory. Except typewriters are $20/$200 Claude code subscriptions.

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

#159

Post by wiseowise »

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.

> and maybe it will make more sense to you

Still doesn't.

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

#160

Post by wiseowise »

SkyBelow wrote: post #146
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?

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 per…

> I think this level of quality drop is extremely unlikely.

Just open Steam, PSStore, Nintendo store.

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