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Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
281–290 of 352 posts
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Oops you're right, but too late to delete. Weird that it got 10 upvotes...
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#283Earlier 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…
> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. Holy shit, no, they are not. What world do you live in?
A lot of them weren't even up 10 years ago. It's not hard to be better than that.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#284Earlier 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…
I've gotten a lot of value out of LLM tools but without extensive feedback and direction I've found even the newer version of Opus pretty bad at writing good tests. First drafts are full of tests with some of these characteristics: - good test, wrong layer, would turn into a mess of "wait why'd tests over there blow up for changes over here" - mostly-good test, subtle issue (yes, this is the status quo with most huma…
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Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#285Frontenders 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.
I was having similar thoughts about building UIs back in the late 90s and a few years thereafter. There were a number of tools, I remember using Tcl/Tk to create a GUI scheduling program that was relied on for many years. Later on we had Delphi and numerous others. I suppose building for the web was so much more complicated because the HTML/CSS/JS infrastructure was ill-suited as a basis for comparable GUIs.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that anyone who has actually worked in this industry for any length of time and is being honest will acknowledge the fact that a lot of human-produced websites/web applications are mediocre at best. The idea that every website or web app was being built by skilled artisans dedicated to the finer arts of their craft before AI is not realistic. AI didn't create spaghetti code, for example. A lot of AI work pr…
The big change I've seen is that before if you knew what you were doing you had two options: - Make something crappy fairly quickly - Make something good a little slower AI has introduced a third option: - Make something really crappy at light speed A lot of companies are very excited about this and it makes it hard to advocate for "make something good a little slower" (even though AI can help speed that up.) It feel…
Except that AI also allows people to make something half-decent at light speed.
Yes, the average vibe coded app might not scale to millions of users, might not be perfectly secure, etc. but let's be honest: the freelance web developer you would have paid $25,000 to build your app a decade ago was in most cases not going to deliver a highly-scalable, highly-secure product either.
AI can allow companies to prioritize speed over quality, but it has also enabled lots of small businesses and entrepreneurs to actually build things that they wouldn't have if they had to pay a developer $xxx/hour.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#287[flagged]
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are lots of examples of such corporations trying to sell a product people didn't want and losing their money.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#289I'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…
It is a hard problem. That is why in the pre-browser days a small number of entities did the hard work and gave the rest of us mere mortals tidy APIs to make use of their efforts without everyone having to painstakingly duplicate what they created each and every time.
But then CSS came along and threw out the baby with the bathwater, returning us back to the bare primitives, forcing entities to redo all that work again. Except this time CSS didn't offer a good mechanism to wrap up that hard work in a nice API bow, so everyone ended up getting pushed into having to redo that same hard work every time they started a new project, leading to a bunch of poor, inconsistent, and often downright wacky implementations.
To be fair, the problem isn't CSS per se, it is just that it is much too low-level for all but the small number of entities focused on the aforementioned hard problems and browsers failed to offer anything higher-level for the rest of us. Javascript has tried taking on a stand-in role for the lack of the higher-level abstraction being natively offered by the browser, but that comes with its own limitations so it isn't always a viable choice, not to mention that having to resort to using a full programming environment completely defeats the purpose of having CSS.
CSS gets all the hate because it is more often than not the wrong tool for the job but the only tool available at hand.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big change I've seen is that before if you knew what you were doing you had two options: - Make something crappy fairly quickly - Make something good a little slower AI has introduced a third option: - Make something really crappy at light speed A lot of companies are very excited about this and it makes it hard to advocate for "make something good a little slower" (even though AI can help speed that up.) It feel…
Except that AI also allows people to make something half-decent at light speed. Yes, the average vibe coded app might not scale to millions of users, might not be perfectly secure, etc. but let's be honest: the freelance web developer you would have paid $25,000 to build your app a decade ago was in most cases not going to deliver a highly-scalable, highly-secure product either. AI can allow companies to prioritize s…
Yeah that’s fair
It still makes it a tougher sell to deliver high quality more slowly
Side note: when it comes to front end I’m thinking less about scalability and security (though they apply) and more about performance, accessibility, reaponsiveness, quality UI, maintainability, basic design sense, etc.