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

mastrojs.github.io

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

#261

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

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…

Great, more of this. I cant stand llm generated UI nor the people that think its sufficient.

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

#262

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

perry2008084 wrote: post #254

This seems to be a contradictory point that requires a tradeoff decision: AI can enhance productivity, but it may also affect the skills of engineers.

It doesnt increase productivity except for people who think producing worthless slop is productive.

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

#263

Post by shimman »

emodendroket wrote: post #237
PunchyHamster wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah I forgot the user is able to stop the force of will from trillion dollar corporations.

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

#264

Post by madrox »

jzig wrote: post #246
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.

> When did designers become the gatekeepers in what a page should look like and how it should behave?

Since...forever? You may not like the waterfall model, but unless you're at a small startup this is how most software gets made. Even the more collaborative shops where FEs give input on designs, it's just that...input on designs owned by a designer. That AI leveled the playing field is my point. It's now much easier for designers to subsume the responsibilities of an FE than the reverse. You know this is true because if it weren't, designers would never have been a thing to begin with.

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

#265

Post by shimman »

8note wrote: post #177
ActionHank wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your ignorance is showing. There is far more to it than all that. I've interviewed far too many nextjs experts who couldn't do anything else. That's not a skill, that's just knowledge, which at this point is freely available.

im not clear what makes that not a skill? other people cant do anything with nextjs, or anything with any front end at all. its applied knowledge, understanding how nextjs works, and using it to build some application

Libraries come and go, but understanding the web means mostly html, js (in the form of web APIs), and css.

I've also been using react professionally since 2015 and I've yet to see a nextjs application in the wild. It seems to mostly confined to the startup sphere.

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

#266

Post by x0x0 »

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…

> native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s

And 1/100th the feature footprint.

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

#267

Post by Unit327 »

olalonde wrote: post #251

> A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing – to just name a few. This would give the previous generation of frontend developers (aka C/C++ developers) a good chuckle. The web was viewed as a mas…

That quote is not from the article and has nothing to do with the article, what is going on here?

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

#268

Post by cproctor »

Unit327 wrote: post #267
olalonde wrote: post #251

> A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing – to just name a few. This would give the previous generation of frontend developers (aka C/C++ developers) a good chuckle. The web was viewed as a mas…

That quote is not from the article and has nothing to do with the article, what is going on here?

It's intended for another item currently on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321631

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

#269

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

jeremyjh wrote: post #111
berkes wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a common-sense mental model for web development. You are contradicting yourself. Either its a "minefield...of edge cases..." Or it's a common-sense model. Not both. I'm convinced we're still in this minefield of edge cases, not in a situation where we've solved all this, and where the tech to build "frontend" is clean, predictable, free of historical baggage etc etc etc. All we have done, is plaster over these foun…

No, they are saying that the frameworks and tools discussed in TFA have made it look coherent. For the most part we have not worried about compatibility for a decade. All abstractions leak a bit but in practice it holds up quite well, well worth the cost savings and flexibility for many apps.

This is wrong. The underlying runtimes, HTML/CSS/ES implementations got much better, they constantly fight incoherences that old timers remember and at the same time add new powerful features.

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

#270

Post by selicos »

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…

With the right harness/agent/skill setup and requirements work, this (any specificity) can become part of the workflow from early stages.

Setting that up and making sure it works, at the early stages, is not what LLMs do best, today. This sort of work is possibly incredibly valuable in the next 12-36 months, depending on what LLMs can be designed to do out of the box.

An Agent that can deliver the correct legal review process for a patent and is correct often enough to validate the savings vs real humans, or at least the speed increase + manual review ala code reviews, is incredibly valuable.

Are we there yet? Maybe this is where current groups like FNCR are trying to go.

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