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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?

#231

Post by bluegatty »

empath75 wrote: post #227
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.

A very, very long time ago, at my first job, the people who used anything other than C were considered 'fake' developers and were resentful that everything was shifting away from C for most things. I felt that :)

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

#232

Post by greenchair »

kangalioo wrote: post #46

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…

modern front end is still an absolute cluster. ask claude to use react on a greenfield project: brings in tanstack, mui, tailwind, shad something or nother, all kinds of stuff. Then when you run into an issue and ask AI to fix it, you watch AI argue with itself in real-time about potential bugs in browsers and in these libraries has opened my eyes to the absolute mess that is modern UI.

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

#233

Post by madrox »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #230
madrox wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

Calling that an argument from assumption is fair. I am basing this on where I think the puck is going, but I don't think I'm wrong. The issues you mention are not unsolvable problems, and AI is very good at independently iterating and improving on an observable objective metric.

Reality is certainly bimodal today, but that's because as an industry we're lagging behind capability. We're in the early days of the innovator's dilemma S-curve.

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

#235

Post by emodendroket »

acedTrex wrote: post #191
emodendroket wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not following what "I dont understand" would entail here. The choice is fairly binary.

Then ask the guy I was replying to and not me.

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

#236

Post by icedchai »

skydhash wrote: post #151
hombre_fatal wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Many humans do the same thing. They write tests that mock so much of the actual code, the "test" is not testing much at all, except perhaps the developer's ability to basically turn the code inside out. It's often just a large volume of crap that has to be maintained (or eventually deleted.)

I agree integration tests are best, with some e2e testing for common scenarios.

I worked at a place that required unit tests for every new method or function. Arguments like "this other (integration) test already covers that. why do I have to add another test?" wouldn't fly. PR reviews would often degrade into arguments about testing and how all database access needed to be mocked...

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

#237

Post by emodendroket »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #224
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.

Users don't have fucking choice in the matter.

I mean, not directly, but they demonstrate by not punishing heavy apps over and over again that they care much more about features.

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

#238

Post by citrin_ru »

kristianc wrote: post #77
oblio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? And if everyone bunkers up and all that open content dries up starting in 2026, let's say, what happens?

It won't happen, for two reasons. One is that great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway. Finer grained controls over opt-outs would be great (the equivalent of a search engine 'nofollow' would be great and will hopefully come with time). Many kinds of technology faced this kind of tragedy of the commons a…

I'm personally was fine with contributing to open-source without any financial reward. But I'm reluctant to release anything in public now because it will be eventually incorporated into the training set for the technology which will (or at least can) lave me without a job and chances to find one.

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

#239

Post by mega_dean »

skydhash wrote: post #151
hombre_fatal wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable

I just saw this comment yesterday about one of the tests from Bun’s rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314311 It reads in the raw source code and uses a regex to assert that “unsafe” is used.

> These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden

I’ve come to the same conclusion, but that’s only because I’m working on solo projects. I think they are probably worth it with multiple devs on the same project.

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

#240

Post by llbbdd »

IMO odd to frame this around the frontend and not all of software development. "The Cloud" and middleman products on top in various iterations over the last fifteen years has deskilled literally all backend work, going back even further to like, Wordpress. The remaining challenges are operating at scales that most software businesses would be wasting time optimizing for, and taste. LLMs are very good at making computers talk to each other, but taste describes the fuzzier boundary where computer meets people, and people are much more finicky and challenging to integrate with than computers.
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