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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?

#161

Post by sevenzero »

carlosjobim wrote: post #153
sevenzero wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...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?

Sir this post is about front end development/products.

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

#162

Post by mock-possum »

wongarsu wrote: post #35

We already had a phase of "deskilled" frontend development: Adobe Flash. Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required. Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript) you could get full interactivity, and animations were fully editable in UI. Sure, all of this came at a terrible price: no accessibility, no SEO discovery, huge loading times. But it also creat…

“Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript)” is laughably inaccurate - the was a deep familiarity with AS and all its quirks to make a performant, durable, responsive GUI in Flash. There were layers to consider when shipping a self contained executable ala Adobe Air - there were other alternative IDEs and compilers apart from Flash proper - fonts, frames, bitmaps vs vector graphics, how audio and video embedding were handled - it was a complete platform, every bit as complex a battlefield as the browser wars.

Hand-waving AS3-driven app development in the 2010s as ‘some slight JS knowledge’ makes me doubt you were actually there. I was there, and that was not what was happening.

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

#163

Post by danielvaughn »

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'…

That's all true - I taught myself how to code from 2009-2012 so I remember what it was like. However, around that time there was also deep focus on architecture, an obsessive focus on rendering performance and page weight. Everyone could recite the loading sequence that HTML pages used, we knew how many requests could be downloaded in parallel, how to best bundle assets for the fastest time to render, etc. So it was a mix of both pain and frustration on one hand, and a pride in one's work on the other hand.

Both have been lost; good riddance the former, but I miss the latter.

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

#164

Post by wiseowise »

jeremyjh wrote: post #112
ActionHank wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All while working for peanuts. Win for everyone, except workers.

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

#165

Post by saratogacx »

cmiles8 wrote: post #52

While AI coding helps a ton in building product prototypes, it also results in products that folks spot as AI from a mile away. Literally just saw startup demo their app and their app which had that “vibe coded UI” look to it. They were given devastating feedback of “Guys this is kinda cool, but you obviously had AI build this and thus anyone else that wants this can have AI build it for them too very quickly. As suc…

What is funny about that is if you setup a basic design system, css and such, The AI generated front end code will fit right in nicely but most don't even go through that basic amount of care.

Rounded corners still seems to be the unending trend through that anything that wasn't already well defined gets infected with.

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

#166

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

trjordan wrote: post #34
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'…

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…

It's just not what I wanted. I got into software because I liked coding, deep technical understanding only excited me because it would help me code better. I don't want to get too "woe is me", there are far worse things in the world than having a vaguely unsatisfying job, but there are life choices I would have made differently had I known coding would be automated in 2026.

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

#167

Post by handelaar »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #143
carlosjobim wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> Contrary to what you seem to believe

Please stop doing this. That is not even close to what he said.

"Some people" do that? Not a controversial statement, and pretending otherwise is to argue in bad faith.

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

#168

Post by hombre_fatal »

d0liver wrote: post #145
hombre_fatal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But software was already in a horrible state before AI, so your dichotomy doesn't work.

The status quo with pre-AI Human Written software on a pedestal is that it doesn't work, and it lacks accessibility, polish, performance considerations, UX considerations, tests, and more.

The built-in rigor is trivial to prove. Just put Opus 4.8 in plan mode and tell it to plan something, like a vt100 emulator.

The question isn't whether you can do better than AI, because you'll put your foot on the scale and give yourself infinite time, attention, and energy just so you can say yes. It's whether AI can do as good or better than you with the same time, attention, and energy you would have given a task in the first place.

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

#169

Post by m132 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #120
m132 wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

I'm afraid that there's never been a shortage of poor quality software

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

#170

Post by taken2000 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #58

We're in the software industry. The whole point of that industry is automating things that are very repetitive. Frontend projects are very repetitive. And now AI is doing that for us. Fantastic, fees up a lot of time to build more interesting things. De-skilling for skills that just aren't that relevant anymore because we've solved the problem (with AI or otherwise) has been a constant in our industry ever since comp…

Instead of giving up on frontend the new efficiency to AI should free resources push the frontend further, the same for backend. The world needs lots of more software than we currently can create.
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