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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?

#221

Post by contingencies »

Zababa wrote: post #20

The part on the Bauhaus movement is weird, and I'm not sure I agree about how the author thinks about users. >What did previous generations of craftspeople do when everyday goods and buildings suddenly could be mass-produced by industrial processes? One reaction was to copy the style of old, and make the industry crank out widgets and buildings that at least looked like they were handcrafted. Is this a reaction by cr…

IMHO Bauhaus was about design for functionalism and 'getting the job done' efficiently. When viewed in this sense, a Bauhaus frontend might be gopher, an old Nokia phone, or the unix command line.

A modern tent is arguably the evolution of the Bauhaus spirit applied to structure. Tents do suck in comfort compared to pre-Bauhaus European buildings, but if you're going to carry a building to the top of a mountain, they're not a bad option!

ie. Pre-Bauhaus = It costs what it costs. Tradition reigns. Bauhaus = Mass manufacturing and material properties in-scope for design, resulting in often better design when holistically considered.

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

#222

Post by PunchyHamster »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #80
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…

> 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…

> That's why I think AI is saving software in some ways, not leading to worse software.

So far the way AI is making software better is mostly checking for common bugs and acting as review/pair programming buddy, not the code.

The code is bad. At best okay. But you can make a lot of it. And it's not bad enough to not be good enough.

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

#223

Post by PunchyHamster »

madeofpalk wrote: post #42
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'…

> 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…

> 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.

I dunno, seemed easier 20+ years ago when in high school we were taught how to use Delphi than now.

HTML/CSS is just terrible way to build interfaces. It was made to build basically resizeable documents, not applications, and it shows in every crevice

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

#224

Post by PunchyHamster »

emodendroket wrote: post #85
fny wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.

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.

Users don't have fucking choice in the matter.

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

#225

Post by madrox »

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 tend to agree. I believe most of these arguments, whether consciously or not, are rooted in sour grapes.

If AI were already the norm, and someone came along and said, "hey! I've got a great idea! Instead of AI building all this stuff, what if we did it by hand?" and talk about all these amazing benefits to hand crafting code, people would largely say no thanks.

As far as the abstraction argument goes, well, we've been creating higher order abstractions for a long time and called it good. I don't see why we should suddenly be against abstraction.

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

#226

Post by bluegatty »

'Deskilling' is totally fine if it's replaced by people who have skills at a higher level of abstraction.

Often - the people who are replaced don't recognize the inherent skills of the people who operate the machines that do their work.

But there are often non-obvious tradeoffs.

Having Ikea means we can have vastly, vastly more selection and choice in the things we put in our homes.

And the 'quality' is usually fit for purpose (just because it's not made of Oak, doesn't mean it won't last a very long time).

But when you see a winding staircase or those custom moulds .... well you realize 'what we've lost'.

There's always a trade-off even if the net positive is there.

That 'externalized craftsmanship' sure does add up though ...

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

#227

Post by empath75 »

bluegatty wrote: post #226

'Deskilling' is totally fine if it's replaced by people who have skills at a higher level of abstraction. Often - the people who are replaced don't recognize the inherent skills of the people who operate the machines that do their work. But there are often non-obvious tradeoffs. Having Ikea means we can have vastly, vastly more selection and choice in the things we put in our homes. And the 'quality' is usually fit f…

> Often - the people who are replaced don't recognize the inherent skills of the people who operate the machines that do their work.

It's not so much the people who _operate_ the machines as the people who _build_ the machines.

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

#228

Post by madrox »

Frontend web development has always been particularly vulnerable to changes in technology. The role has mostly been responsible for translating the vision of the designer into code. You could say FEs dive into things like TTFP metrics, but arguably these are all things designers care about too, and if you give AI a metric it can measure on its own it is very good at optimizing it.

If FEs want to keep working in this area, I highly encourage them to become excellent designers. Many think they are, but can't quite fly solo without a designer and soar to the same heights.

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

#230

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

madrox wrote: post #225
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 tend to agree. I believe most of these arguments, whether consciously or not, are rooted in sour grapes. If AI were already the norm, and someone came along and said, "hey! I've got a great idea! Instead of AI building all this stuff, what if we did it by hand?" and talk about all these amazing benefits to hand crafting code, people would largely say no thanks. As far as the abstraction argument goes, well, we've b…

That's an argument from assumption. The issue isn't whether AI is "building all this stuff" but how well it's doing it, how well the people using it are doing it, how expensive it really is, and whether there are observable objective benefits at the end - not just a subjective sense that some work is taking less time.

The reality is probably bimodal. The people who are benefiting are benefiting a lot, but they're likely in a minority. The majority will be tokenmaxxing at great expense and spinning their wheels in real terms.

But there's no hard research to prove that.

Considering the huge sums involved, the absence is interesting.

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