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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?

#311

Post by MDCore »

torginus wrote: post #300
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…

Personally the biggest conceptual problem with HTML/CSS is that it's incredibly unintuitive with mapping to real-world concepts, and not low-level (or straightforward) enough so that the low-level primitives are easy to manipulate. 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…

The sea of divs and the abandonment of HTMLs is a result of the poorly built frameworks. Actual HTML and CSS has not abandoned those core ideas, and the frameworks often reimplement native features badly (e.g. the shadcdn radio button example). HTML crafted with care is not a sea of divs, it is markup one can read that logically and cleanly describes what you see.

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

#312

Post by MDCore »

docheinestages wrote: post #63

You talk about deskilling. But are these skills even relevant to the ultimate goal of producing a web page according to the design specification? Should we have been worried about the "deskilling" that happened when we transitioned from punch cards to high level languages?

Yes they are relevant. From the article, skills like "accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing" are relevant to the ultimate goal of producing a web page. Front-end development is not merely implementing a design specification. The skills listed are relevant to transformkng the design specification into a web site/app that runs on the many devices and platforms and is used by a variety of users.

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

#313

Post by duskdozer »

trjordan wrote: post #34
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'…

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. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults.

This is the opposite of my experience. I find websites take much more time to load, are designed to require many more actions and interaction time to navigate, often break and are replaced by a blank page if any error occurs, use huge numbers of ad/tracking requests and JS, and are filled with accessibility-standard-violating unnecessary JS animations.

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

#314

Post by prontos91 »

danielbln wrote: post #208
prontos91 wrote: post #178

I had recently needed to build a dashboard builder. Simple one. Copilot created it within minutes. A working even though simple looking one. Several more inputs later i had a working usable one. Came back to it later but my tokens are finished :(. So i had to manually review the code and make changes. Code was around 3k lines in one single file and another 500 of css code. Took me a long time to understand the code a…

You handle large code base by enforcing best practices that should have always been enforced. Proper up to date documentation, strict adherence to conventions and coding guidelines, cross review of deliverables, TDD, and so on. Just whispering "make me a dashboard" into the machine's ear is not how you drive agents to create maintainable and understandable code.

So you are saying Ai is a smart/fast auto complete and the actual intelligence is driven by humans? Reality aside it took me a lot of time to just having the version i wanted. But i find increasing frustrating is that solution chose by the ai is not optional, not production grade. Which require even more use if tokens and more time waste. Its good for management but for us difficult to maintain.

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

#316

Post by gen2brain »

_el1s7 wrote: post #219
threetonesun wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontend developer here, frontend projects are incredibly repetitive. It is still wild to me that a complete set of UI controls that you can customize isn't native to all browsers. I can't count how many sortable / filterable tables I've implemented. I would much rather 99% of web UIs I work on that are essentially a series of forms be automated away to work on much more interesting things.

Listen, frontend developer, there's this thing called "npm", you should look that up.

Recommended for people who like the horror genre.

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

#317

Post by ifwinterco »

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'…

I disagree that what makes front end hard is mostly accidental complexity.

Some of it is for sure (CSS, while I actually quite like it, isn't perfect).

However it's fundamentally harder to get the basics right in front end than back end because:

- You don't control the environment (meaning "browser quirks" are actually inevitable to some extent)

- You don't control the screen size and resolution of the device (meaning responsive design is not accidental complexity, it's inherently a somewhat complicated thing you have to address)

- Internal state is often visible to users (an API can be a complete mess internally as long as it returns the correct JSON in a reasonable time. Not so with frontend)

Compare that to backend where you control everything except any external APIs you need to use, it's chalk and cheese.

The reason the market doesn't value front end skills isn't because they aren't difficult or valuable - a really slick front end is worth its weight in gold.

The reason is it's almost impossible to tell in a 1h interview if someone is actually good at front end or not, relative to back end coding tasks which are more deterministic

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

#318

Post by vitally3643 »

m132 wrote: post #26
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'…

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…

You're describing the state that software was already in prior to AI. Usability, accessibility, intuitiveness have all gone down the toilet in the blind drive to make everything "sleek" and "modern" by removing all text, reducing programs to hieroglyphs floating in a sea of padding. Removing features so somebody can say they changed something. We've refused the notion that software can ever be finished and now have to find some way to justify endlessly updating software forever.

AI might make the problem worse, it might not. But the problems you outline and the sharply declining computer literacy they bring are already here, driven 100% by human developers.

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

#319

Post by fg137 »

NietTim wrote: post #306
fg137 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised to find out that there aren't that many "interesting things" to build.

That just means you lack creativity, exploring new ideas and building new interesting things is easier then ever, all you need is an idea.

Yeah, all you need is an idea.

Look at how Meta's "ideas" turn out.

VR and metaverse surely sound like interesting stuff. Right? Right???

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

#320

Post by fg137 »

esalman wrote: post #274
fg137 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised to find out that there aren't that many "interesting things" to build.

This opinion should only come from a CS grad who is accustomed to building CRUD apps and allergic to any real world problem domain. At my work in insurance solutions we're solving perabyte scale problems. We do not have a Rust developer in the team, but taught ourselves with the AI and now automating workflows which took days to under a minute now.

Completely missing the point.

If you look at the speed a company rolls out new products/features, it should be obvious that "interesting ideas" especially good ones are infrequent and rare.

No offense, "using Rust to address a performance problem" is by no means novel or interesting. That is just another person's CRUD.

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