321–330 of 658 posts
If you have front-end and back-end separate, you're doing web development wrong.
Also, this is a really obvious thing. It's unbelievable how the main way people organize is the other way around.
When stuff was getting too complicated, I looked for ways to make things simpler. Developers have spent decades trying to figure out ways to make things simpler, less code the better, only to throw it all out the window because chatbot go brrrrrr.
In a very real sense, developers efforts to make web development simpler have clearly failed. This is true regardless of the existence of LLMs and/or your opinion of their utility.
If you or some other person don't program in the way that makes it simple, it's not our communitary problem. What matters is that the potential is there.
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I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…
There are many people who enjoy spending an afternoon working on a classic car. There are also many people who enjoy spending an afternoon driving a classic car. Sometimes there are people who enjoy both. Sometimes there are people that really like driving but not the tinkering and some who are the opposite.
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Wait till the VC tap gets shut off. You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div. ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed. Or: ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.
Just you wait until the powers that be take cars away from us! What absolute FOOLS you all are to shape your lives around something that could be taken away from us at any time! How are you going to get to work when gas stations magically disappear off the face of the planet? I ride a horse to work, and y'all are idiots for developing a dependency on cars. Next thing you're gonna tell me is we're going to go to war f…
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I'm using it to build things. Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it. I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout. It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim.…
With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't. It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.
It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did.
There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the "Worked example effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests that showing people "worked examples" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves.
> Even with refinement and back-and-forth prompting, I’m easily 10x more productive Developers notoriously overestimate the productivity gains of AI, especially because it's akin to gambling every time you make a prompt, hoping for the AI's output to work. I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive.
I think it depends what you are doing. I’ve had Claude right the front end of a rust/react app and it was 10x if not x (because I just wouldn’t have attempted it). I’ve also had it write the documentation for a low level crate - work that needs to be done for the crate to be used effectively - but which I would have half-arsed because who like writing documentation? Recently I’ve been using it to write some async rus…
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I would never suggest that only I know better. Plenty of other people are observing the same thing, and there is also research backing it up. Maybe shocked is the wrong term. Surprised, perhaps.
There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case.
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It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done. So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.
No shame in that. I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. They don't think like graphic designers, or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. It's not meant to be generated. If there is some person for whom CSS layout comes naturally, I have not met them. As far as I can tell their design goal w…
Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability.
Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout.
> They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners.
CSS is dramatically easier if you write it in order of specificity: styles that affect large parts of the DOM go at the top; more specific styles come later. Known as Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS), it has been around for a long time [1].
> It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation.
If you mean linting or adhering to coding guidelines, there are several; Stylelint is popular [2]. Any editor that supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), like VS Code and Neovim (among others), can use CSS and CSS Variables LSPs [3], [4] for code completion, diagnostics, formatting, etc.
> It's not meant to be generated. Says who? There have been CSS generators and preprocessors since 2006, not to mention all the tools which turn mockups into CSS. LLMs have no problem generating CSS.
Lots of developers need to relearn CSS; the book Every Layout is a good start [5].
[1]: https://css-tricks.com/dont-fight-the-cascade-control-it/
[2]: https://stylelint.io
[3]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-css-languageservice
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With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't. It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.
The YouTube analogy doesn't completely hold. It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did. There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the "Worked example effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests t…
In order to learn you generally need to actually do the thing, and usually multiple times. My point is that it's easy to use an AI to shortcut that part, with a healthy dose of sycophancy to make you feel like you learned so well.
Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents. AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up any more. If you have signific…
I don't know but to me this all sounds like the antithesis of what makes programming fun. You don't have productivity goals for hobby coding where you'd have to make the most of your half an hour -- that sounds too much like paid work to be fun. If you have a half an hour, you tinker for a half an hour and enjoy it. Then you continue when you have another half an hour again. (Or push into night because you can't make…