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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?

#211

Post by icedchai »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #168
d0liver wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A couple months back, I had Sonnet build me a browser-based VT-100 terminal emulator. I then had it build me a websocket-to-telnet gateway for connecting some old retro systems to it. Both worked pretty well.

Could I have done it on my own? Yes, eventually. The problem is I would've lost interest and moved on to some other useless project before getting that far.

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

#212

Post by threetonesun »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #206
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…

> Frontend projects are very repetitive. I’m sorry, what? This is such a shit take, I don’t even know where to start. What’s repetitive about them? That all UIs contain buttons or what? If this is something that people actually believe, I can understand why UX has went to shit and then got even worse since the 90s.

Frontend developer here, frontend projects are incredibly repetitive. It is still wild to me that a complete set of UI controls that you can customize isn't native to all browsers. I can't count how many sortable / filterable tables I've implemented. I would much rather 99% of web UIs I work on that are essentially a series of forms be automated away to work on much more interesting things.

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

#213

Post by fg137 »

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…

You might be surprised to find out that there aren't that many "interesting things" to build.

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

#214

Post by tomnipotent »

francisofascii wrote: post #53
ElProlactin wrote: post #25

> And we’re saddened that the new process results in lower quality work, and that a lot of people just don’t seem to care. 1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. There was a lot of mediocri…

> the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product Some of us were lucky to have a few periods in our career where this was the case. I would agree that this disappeared prior to AI.

It still exists now, but it's always been a incredibly small niche role.

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

#215

Post by coldtea »

x0x0 wrote: post #174
coldtea wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. And I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions, all the way to modern multi-MB frameworks and Electron, is a regression. Of course no one gives a shit about things like the user's computer/memory utilization. Or de…

> feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions But again, accidental complexity. The web platform is utterly rotten. So the people we should blame are chrome et al for not providing a standard lib or anything approaching a reasonable UI framework, which forces people to reimplement what a competent platform provides. Electron is an artifact of the richest c…

>Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron.

And yet we could build native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s, with 1/100 the resources (tutorials, third party libs, native GUI frameworks, IDEs, etc) available, and 1/10th the target user base.

It's not about "platform specific code, being hysterically expensive to build and maintain". It was more expensive in the 1990s and 00s too, but people built it and maintained it just fine.

It's companies chosing convenience.

Especially since it's not poor programmers and small software shops going for Electron. It's the biggest multi-billion to trillion dollar companies.

Facebook uses this crap, Slack uses this crap, Adobe and Google use similar web-based UI crap (in what used to be native apps), and so on.

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

#216

Post by stellar678 »

customguy wrote: post #56
aspenmartin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then? It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? > But even then, people aren't entitled to the knowledge "created" by doing the work. If attribution and compensation were tackled in earnest, if you could only train on the materials of the people you pay to produce those…

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? Assume everybody is now using LLM because they're better, and because the people who created artisanal things in their free time out of sheer generosity no longer have free time, or any food at all, or simply no longer feel generous. And the few people who are such specialists that they would be slowed down by them only do proprietary work, f…

Presuming that conventions, standards, best-practices will continue to evolve as people do this work - whether with or without AI - I can't see any reason why the resulting advancements wouldn't be published in a way that builds a record for the future.

My documentation tends to be more thorough and well-maintained when I'm building software with a coding agent. A million tokens of context tends to be better at that kind of thing than my own brain when I'm neck-deep in solving a difficult problem.

And presuming the best practices are adequate and don't need to evolve (which seems unlikely) - then the current public historical record is also adequate.

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

#217

Post by mschuster91 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #130
emodendroket wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that most users do not notice or care about this at all so it's a completely reasonable sacrifice to make to have rich applications.

The bit that goes unsaid about Electron is... why? If the goal is a legitimate app that has the lifecycle of an app that you start up and then shut down today the answer is "just write a web application" and then it "just works" on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Meta Quest, etc. Mostly people get pissed about Electron because they have 15 Electron apps running in the tray burning up resources all the time and p…

> It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem.

The resource burn is an Electron problem. I member using HTML as "Active Desktop" in the Windows 98 era. You could drag an Internet Explorer widget into VB6 applications if you wanted (OLE, COM and ActiveX, damn that was an era of powerful technologies!). But it was one shared runtime across the OS which meant it did not have anywhere near close to the performance impact that even one Electron app has today.

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

#218

Post by mvdtnz »

Frontenders took a relatively simple problem and inflated the complexity to astronomical scales by wrapping it in ridiculous unnecessary functional programming concepts. And just when it felt like it couldn't get any more arcane or complicated they introduced the hooks API.

The period 2015-2025 was a decade of frontenders fooling their managers into letting them build their own job security into their web UI.

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

#219

Post by _el1s7 »

threetonesun wrote: post #212
fuzzy2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frontend projects are very repetitive. I’m sorry, what? This is such a shit take, I don’t even know where to start. What’s repetitive about them? That all UIs contain buttons or what? If this is something that people actually believe, I can understand why UX has went to shit and then got even worse since the 90s.

Frontend developer here, frontend projects are incredibly repetitive. It is still wild to me that a complete set of UI controls that you can customize isn't native to all browsers. I can't count how many sortable / filterable tables I've implemented. I would much rather 99% of web UIs I work on that are essentially a series of forms be automated away to work on much more interesting things.

Listen, frontend developer, there's this thing called "npm", you should look that up.

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

#220

Post by pickleRick243 »

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…

This sounds like a fantasy in your head rather than something that actually happened. No competent VC would give meaningless feedback like this- if it's good, it's good; who cares if AI built it? If it's the same quality product but wasn't obviously vibe coded, then it would be fine? Only someone ideologically opposed to AI would care.
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