291–300 of 352 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
We've moved the comment to the right thread.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
You get a lot of things for free with LLMs. You program an input box that goes to a form, handle the backend, make sure the variable names match the box, the API, the data structures and the database columns. All the brain matter making sure that flow works is mastered by an LLM since even with GPT 3.5 (not that I am advocating using that anymore). But the point is, since that's taken care of, why not also let it handle aria, input hints, mouse effects, state storage, animations since most of it's handled by putting "handle aria, input hints, mouse effects, state storage, animations" any time the front end files are changed." in agents.md
I would say that's rigor. Now you go a step further and have another LLM in your QA cycle that double checks it.
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Just shows that a lot of people read the comments without reading the article :) We've moved the comment to the right thread.
Ok thanks, my bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces . You can barely do styled text. CSS and HTML are literally littered with accidental, ad-hoc, badly thought-out and badly des…
> That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces. You can barely do styled text. Let me guess, you stopped reading web standards documents because Facebook told you it didn’t matter, since you could just ship 10MB of javascript with every request
Try again.
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'…
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…
Today I find myself having less patience for it all, because things just tend to work a lot more often than they don't.
With AI, I find so many small businesses and others I deal with which have their own websites have started to have better design, better performance and while I don't know if they are really accessible but they tend to have more prevalence of aria labels.
Not to take away from your experiences, just sharing my anecdotes.
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'…
> the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” LLMs feel threatening to anyone who had an edge by knowing how to navigate domains with a lot of weird and complex behavior. It’s nice to feel like businesses need you if they want to…
Also reminds me of that episode of Star Trek TOS 'The Ultimate Computer'
And the STTNG episode 'The Game'
Einstein was correct, the only thing in the universe that is infinite is human stupidity.
That is why I feel threatened by LLMs.
This is not the lament of the code getting worse (it's not) but the coders losing the knowledge of how to do it by hand without LLMs. If people really wanted to learn how to do things by hand, they can. In fact the AI is probably going to be infinitely more patient and knowledgable than any senior dev if you really wanna do this by hand. Just turn off the AI's ability to modify the code and just have it give you advice on the side.
The reason why nobody does that anymore is because most engineers work for capitalists not artists. It's the same reason I don't know how to farm my own food or make my own clothes like my ancestors did. Most people do programming because it's a job - not because it's an artistic passion. And that's OK.
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'…
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…
For example, WPF programs can have great accessibility - this comes from the fact that programmers can manipulate primitives which are semantically meaningful (buttons, lists etc).
In HTML its just a sea of divs which lately have become an implementation detail to hang classes on to, and sometimes not even exposed directly to the developer, if you use a SPA framework.
There's not a snowballs chance in hell you can build a quality accesibility solution on top of that.
HTML's main idea was that HTML was a document model, that described the content in a semantically meaningful way, and CSS was the 'rest' which kind of allowed to make the whole thing pretty - the idea going as far as separating content from looks should allow people to 'theme' their websites and completely redefine layout.
That idea has been completely abadoned. I'm not a frontend dev - although I can make a competent webpage by myself, I don't have deep insights into what's going on in the field - maybe Web Components will allow people to create semantically meaningful pages in a standard way?
Maybe there should be another layer of abstraction on top of what we have - which is truly semantic, this time for real?