Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade? • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by FranOntanaya » Fri, May 29, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

mvdtnz wrote: post #218

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.

I'm going to say something that is a bit out there, but to this day web frontend still feels like a downgrade in some ways to basic things Visual Basic had in 1998.

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

#242

Post by llbbdd » Fri, May 29, 2026, 11:37 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #113

Sometimes I think the techniques we used to build complex user interfaces in HTML without AJAX or DOM manipulation back in the early 2000s are effectively lost, like the techniques used to build the pyramids: insofar as younger full-stack developers have been "deskilled" many of them think you need Javascript to, say, validate forms. Once you are using AJAX and manipulating the DOM the complexity of asynchronous comm…

I often think that especially on HN React is just a four-letter word proxying some broader complaint about the interactive web and that most people complaining about it don't actually understand what problems it solves. In general if you show me the source to any sufficiently complex web app that doesn't depend on React, I'll dig through it and find the analogue to React you built inside it.

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

#243

Post by jerhewet » Fri, May 29, 2026, 11:43 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #215

x0x0 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 90…

Microsoft Teams. The poster child for web-based UI crap.

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

#244

Post by llbbdd » Fri, May 29, 2026, 11:46 PM UTC

Devasta wrote: post #99

People don't use web tech because they care about quality, they target it very specifically because its one of the places where quality doesn't matter. If your native app crashes, your users will curse your name. Webpage or Electron slop freezes? They'll shrug and restart. This idea that quality ever existed on the web is ahistorical at best.

They target it because it's the best distribution platform we have, the tech stack is unified, and managing native apps has only gotten less attractive over time. Chrome, the only native app that matters to most users, re-opens your tabs on the rare occasion it crashes. Most native apps are much less reliable than that.

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

#245

Post by llbbdd » Fri, May 29, 2026, 11:47 PM UTC

efsher_azoy2 wrote: post #48

iLoveOncall wrote: post #2

> JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand I'm sorry but that simply does not make any sense. How is increasing the breadth of your skills leading to a deskilling?

I guess the author never tried to write big FE application in jQuery :D It definitely required some skill.

They're in good company with most of these replies, apparently. Lots of sour grapes in here.

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

#246

Post by jzig » Sat, May 30, 2026, 12:14 AM UTC

madrox wrote: post #228

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…

Agree and disagree. When did designers become the gatekeepers in what a page should look like and how it should behave? I never liked the pattern of leadership and design throwing a Figma over the fence and the saying “now make it”. Have seen plenty of it in agency work. If anything, AI has leveled the playing field - the onus can fall on both of them to do the doing or fess up that they need the other.

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

#247

Post by acters » Sat, May 30, 2026, 12:19 AM UTC

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'…

AI consistently places animated objects behind a blur object which causes the browser to constantly repaint. Google's ai mode introduced one, some other websites clearly vibe codes included them too.

At first it confused me why my GPU usage spiked and fans started blowing harder, but now I see it is a common mistake that AI makes but no one tests properly. It is possible a human can make this mistake but I sheldom experienced this ever in my life until now.

I run 240hz monitors, and that meant the browser was trying to do 240 repaints per second. Blocking it with unlock origin is the only way. Ridiculous

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

#248

Post by randlet » Sat, May 30, 2026, 12:21 AM UTC

knuckleheads wrote: post #45

trjordan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

> Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so

This seems like a good insight and it feels true to me as well.

My guess is the absolute number of people who treat it like a "craft" is higher than 20 years ago, but as a fraction of all developers it has shrunk dramatically.

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

#249

Post by maxdo » Sat, May 30, 2026, 12:33 AM UTC

Great UI cult could be an early pre-ai phenomena , not a lost decade.

you will need 100 times less of front end , if any action can be asked or explain in voice, text or video or slides always custom to your request. you don't need navigation complex forms to structure. just text, animation to wait, and a few way to embed more complex structures, like text and basic html with charts.

this sounds like "almost ui" but in reality it's not. this is text + some custom visuzalizations adhoc.

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

#250

Post by d0mine » Sat, May 30, 2026, 12:42 AM UTC

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…

In practice, you would use an already written implementation, maintained by somebody else. An option that is often ignored by LLM (copy-paste galore).

For example, imagine if textual-serve author would reimplement xterm.js What effect it would make on quality.

LLMs increase technical debt rapidly. It is unclear whether they can deal with the mess they create. But we'll know soon (no need to wait years, to get immovable mess).

The positive side of LLMs is that they confirm experimentally the usefulness of many software engineering practices (testing,docs, adrs, design, formal specs etc)