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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?

#321

Post by berkes »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #269
jeremyjh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Certainly.

But many of yhose foundations are wrong.

Mostly, because they were designed and implemented in a way that cemented them in place.

Is HTML the right abstraction for UI toolkit? If not, can we ever move towards an alternative that is? Maybe via wasm, IDK. Or css? Where we can never change the legacy (body has a margin, select is untylable) only add new, alternatives next to it (flex, datalist).

JavaScript is the only option, but it's fundamental design (weak typing, no parallelism, make it a poor choice for anything of scale. Which is why anything large or complex gets built in other languages that transpile, or that are somewhat available (wasm, webgl) as alternative.

Point being: yes, it is improving. So fast that an oldtimer like me cannot keep up. But all that improvement is tethered to foundations that are wholly unsuitable for what we want to use it for.

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

#322

Post by christophilus »

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…

Dunno. I did C++ GUI programming back in the day. It wasn’t hard. It would’ve been hard to get light/dark mode and responsive design right, probably, but in my (albeit fuzzy) memory, it wasn’t any harder than building nice web applications. The hard part was just stupid C++ nonsense that Rust and Zig and other nice things are finally here to put out of its misery.

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

#323

Post by coldtea »

x0x0 wrote: post #266
coldtea wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What? They had more features that we gave up, including native platform integration.

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

#324

Post by aspenmartin »

oblio wrote: post #273
aspenmartin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s literally how these models are trained today. They of course use open source data but that’s no longer the most important source, it’s high quality prompts and verifiable tests and a lot of inference compute. They also have massive flywheels from users from which they can mine good data or at the very least again good prompts which can be just as important.

And everything we know about these companies points to unsustainability, before we even get to very high impact content lawsuits which haven't even been settled. Let alone lots of data sets being pulled out of public view and being moved to anti LLM licenses (with explicit licensing for training). We will see how this shakes out in the coming years, as Anthropic, OpenAI & co file for IPO or run out of private funding…

You think this train is going to stop because of a lawsuit? And again, if all data was officially off limits for these companies, it wouldn't matter. They have code traces from their users which is arguably much better, they can license code (you'd be surprised to know that these companies are not just stealing everyones data they are paying for it), and they can create data via paying people to do it.

And yes, we will see how it shakes out, Anthropic or OpenAI may collapse just as netscape did, but I hope your implication is not "AI in general will be extinguished like the blockchain" or something

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

#325

Post by knuckleheads »

randlet wrote: post #248
knuckleheads wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

> Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so This seems like a good insight and it feels true to me as well. My guess is the absolute number of people who treat it like a "craft" is higher than 20 years ago, but as a fraction of all developers it has shrunk dramatically.

I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about software explicitly not being a craft for many years now and life keeps getting in the way. It's a direct response to the Etsy engineering blog, "Code As Craft". I agree that there are more code craftsmen in general than before, but by percentage there's way more software engineers. Engineering best practices to me are in many ways about robbing coding and software from the mystique of craftsmanship and turning it into a repeatable industrial process that isn't inhumane per se but doesn't depend on any particular person to make it work.

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

#326

Post by hkeni »

You are onpoint about deskilling. This phenomenon occurred when “UX designers” were replaced. At that time front end developers rejoiced. Now that the front end developers are being replaced, we see a lot of fear mongering and loud behavior as I figure that these are the same people who maintain and contribute to Reddit, substack communities. As for determinism for code abstracted to even high level, I have a theory that if we the AI is allowed to function at the lowest level we human can understand, which would be assembly language, then we may be able to get some determinism back.

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

#327

Post by skydhash »

raincole wrote: post #310
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 fully agree. The reason that LLMs seemingly defy No Silver Bullet is that the premise of that theory is flawed. Software development has been mostly accidental complexity, not essential complexity. Actually I believe even with LLMs' help, the accidental part still takes the lion's share of the total complexity.

Not really. The issue is that inexperienced people, while trying to solve the essential complexity, are creating so much accidental complexity that soon the project either collapses or oscillates between bugs. LLM is just the highway to reach that state sooner.

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

#328

Post by skydhash »

9rx wrote: post #289
madeofpalk wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 aga…

CSS is for styling documents, not for creating applications interface (which has a whole sets of constraints). It's like trying to use typographic design rules to create a car dashboard. CSS is great, just not fit for that particular job. There's an handful of properties that are the same (padding, margin, border, background color,...), but one common thing with native toolkits is that they have specific widgets for layouts.

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

#329

Post by RugnirViking »

ElProlactin wrote: post #43
everdrive wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. I think this is more of "another brick in the wall." There was already a LOT of pressure to do the bare minimum to fulfill requirements and then decl…

If your requirements are reasonable and serve the needs of end users and the business, doing "the bare minimum" isn't such a bad thing. "I just remove everything that is not David." Of course, the requirements aren't always right, but in my experience, engineers/developers are just as capable as business owners of defining requirements poorly.

> If your requirements are reasonable and serve the needs of end users and the business

Have you ever heard of the idea of malicious compliance? doing exactly what is required, and no more, is the path to ruin for all of us. Requirements will never work this way.

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

#330

Post by skydhash »

fg137 wrote: post #319
NietTim wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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???

VR and virtual worlds have been explored for decades, both in fiction and in the real world. The issue has always been that the target market is small. I don't know how Meta does market study, but the conclusion was already foreseen.

But the realm of what you can do with a computer is huge and working on the web is a very small part of it. Some other interesting part (for me) are OS development, network communication, computer architecture, embedded hardware and programming languages.

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