191–200 of 352 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will pick the software not existing at all every time. Easily without a thought.
I think that's an absurd thing to believe, but if we've moved beyond "I don't understand" to "I don't agree" then my post served its purpose.
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'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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can still code all you like, youre just not going to get paid for it.
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'm doing the latter btw, so I know what they get wrong, but it won't fool me into building an unmaintainable mess. My frontend skills come in real handy every time the agents go off the rail.
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'…
There are, roughly, 3 tiers of developers with regard to any such labor saving tech (js libraries etc.)
People who could do a good job low level and can do it faster with libraries. People who couldn't, or couldn't be bothered, before the libraries, but can now accomplish things. That is the good part. And then there are the unwashed masses, who couldn't dream of accomplishing anything on low level but now can, and who at least in case of JavaScript far outnumber the previous category. Like when I messaged a webmaster whose side would download an uncached 3mb script blob on every page load (it was their script, not ads), to render few paragraphs of text, and they responded that it was by design and the script couldn't be cashed because some variables in it changed based on time, and that is so large because it contains features necessary for other pages that have more than text. I think we'd all be better served if these people pursued a more appropriate career, for example in the roadside trash pickup.
It remains to be seen how it goes with llms, but personally I'm not optimistic.
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…
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…
That is not remotely the case. All software, not just websites, is a lot worse than it was 10 years ago. Bloated, slow, buggy messes that resulted from the industry hiring a bunch of people who just wanted to do the bare minimum and make fat stacks, rather than hiring people who actually care about good engineering.
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'…
Only because you've not invested time[1] to learn a11y, but that is par for the course: LLMs are pretty good at impressing people without a deeper understanding of a field with its statistically average outputs.
My hot-take: one shouldn't oversee an LLM task whose output they are unable to evaluate.
1. And you don't have to! We have limited time, accessibility is broad, there are numerous standards, and screen readers can be unergonomic, to put it lightly. But a human has common sense, and can care. I doubt there's enough a11y training data to match a caring human testing and thinking through interactions. Sadly, human software QA is now threatened with extinction.