Web development is fun again • Hacker News Board

Re: Web development is fun again

#331

Post by hxtk » Sun, Jan 04, 2026, 11:56 PM UTC

yason wrote: post #153

simonw wrote: post #7

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…

As I've gotten more experience I've tended to find more fun in tinkering with architectures than tinkering with code. I'm currently working on making a secure zero-trust bare metal kubernetes deployment that relies on an immutable UKI and TPM remote attestation. I'm making heavy use of LLMs for the different implementation details as I experiment with the architecture. As far as I know, to the extent I'm doing anything novel, it's because it's not a reasonable approach for engineering reasons even if it technically works, but I'm learning a lot about how TPMs work and the boot process and the kernel.

I still enjoy writing code as well, but I see them as separate hobbies. LLMs can take my hand-optimized assembly drag racing or the joy of writing a well-crafted library from my cold dead hands, but that's not always what I'm trying to do and I'll gladly have an LLM write my OCI layout directory to CPIO helper or my Bazel rule for putting together a configuration file and building the kernel so that I can spend my time thinking about how the big pieces fit together and how I want to handle trust roots and cold starts.

Re: Web development is fun again

#332

Post by ckw » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:00 AM UTC

llmslave2 wrote: post #117

> 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.

From one personal project,

Last month:

  128 files changed, 39663 insertions(+), 4439 deletions(-)
  Range: 8eb4f6a..HEAD
  Non-merge commits: 174
  Date range (non-merge): 2025-12-04 → 2026-01-04 (UTC)
  Active days (non-merge): 30

Last 7 days:

  59 files changed, 19412 insertions(+), 857 deletions(-)
  Range: c8df64e..HEAD
  Non-merge commits: 67
  Date range (non-merge): 2025-12-28 → 2026-01-04 (UTC)
  Active days (non-merge): 8

This has a lot of non-trivial stuff in it. In fact, I'm just about done with all of the difficult features that had built up over the past couple years.

Re: Web development is fun again

#333

Post by dismalaf » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:01 AM UTC

> As a solo developer, you could manage everything. From idea to execution. Or at least, it felt that way

It's still that way with Rails. Probably other stacks. Sad that the default nowadays is so unproductive that solo devs don't think they can do things.

Re: Web development is fun again

#334

Post by MrDarcy » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:04 AM UTC

hxtk wrote: post #331

yason wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I've gotten more experience I've tended to find more fun in tinkering with architectures than tinkering with code. I'm currently working on making a secure zero-trust bare metal kubernetes deployment that relies on an immutable UKI and TPM remote attestation. I'm making heavy use of LLMs for the different implementation details as I experiment with the architecture. As far as I know, to the extent I'm doing anythi…

So much this. The act of having the agent create a research report first, a detailed plan second, then maybe implement it is itself fun and enjoyable. The implementation is the tedious part these days, the pie in the sky research and planning is the fun part and the agent is a font of knowledge especially when it comes to integrating 3 or 4 languages together.

Re: Web development is fun again

#335

Post by indigodaddy » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:07 AM UTC

And even more fun with tools/services like exe.dev!

Also apparently the combined of Google Antigravity/$20 Google AI plan/Opus 4.5 is blowing up the AI community lately in Reddit. Apparently the limits right now of Opus thru Antigravity are insanely generous/incredible value. Obviously this could change at any time but perhaps Google has the funds/resources to continue to provide value like this in an attempt to capture the dev userbase / win the AI war.

Re: Web development is fun again

#336

Post by TRiG_Ireland » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:08 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #65

On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… I've been making web stuff for a similar length of time as Mattias by the sounds of it. I started with Perl but moved to PHP 4 pretty soon after. I recognise this problem but I have different take. All the complexity was there 20 years ago,…

I have fond (?) memories of WebEdit, a code editor with FTP integration, so you could directly edit your PHP4 files on the server. (And no, we didn't have source control.)

Re: Web development is fun again

#337

Post by alwillis » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:10 AM UTC

jckahn wrote: post #194

bitwize wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alternatively, just use a local model with zero restrictions.

The next best thing is to use the leading open source/open weights models for free or for pennies on OpenRouter [1] or Huggingface [2].

An article about the best open weight models, including Qwen and Kimi K2 [3].

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/models

[2]: https://huggingface.co

[3]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/

Re: Web development is fun again

#338

Post by HDThoreaun » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:15 AM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #113

lmorchard wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just obtuse. Some folks have fun building their own pizza oven, curing & slicing their own meat, and mixing their own dough. Some folks like to buy mostly pre-made stuff and just play with a few special ingredients. Some folks want to make 5 different pizzas with different flavors. Some folks just order a pizza. Some folks walk out of their house and start hiking. Some folks drive somewhere and then start wal…

It's interesting that nobody has actually answered what part of the process they enjoy.

Having a product that works is what these people enjoy

Re: Web development is fun again

#339

Post by renecito » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:16 AM UTC

so is it fun because you had fallen behind and now you think you can fit with the people with more experience?

well, I have news for you, the people with experience are also using AI too and they can still produce better and more than you do.

Re: Web development is fun again

#340

Post by francasso » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:18 AM UTC

Maybe it's just me, but the idea that the average web project out there is a complicated mess and thank God we have AI so we can finally think about the things that matter while AI deals with the mess... it makes me sad.