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

mastrojs.github.io

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

#331

Post by docheinestages »

MDCore wrote: post #312
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 an…

The design specification can include everything you mentioned. The article argues that "JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade." That's what I can't agree with. We need the simplest way to achieve the desired outcome. Using higher-level means to do that doesn't mean deskilling.

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

#332

Post by NietTim »

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???

I am not Meta, neither are you, nor are we doing things on their level. You can just build small things for you and your friends that fits your specific usecase that other tools do not fit yet, it doesn't need to be a world changing idea.

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

#334

Post by ozim »

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'…

Not only deeply inconvenient but also a lot of times actually making more things worse.

OP writes about doing stuff ”properly” and how “using frameworks” was somehow worse.

Having a framework that is built by actual experts is much better than every “self proclaimed expert” building his own crooked thing.

Being able to switch developers between projects easily is also good for developers. I can switch companies on a whim without having to learn “crooked way of self proclaimed specialists”.

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

#335

Post by justinclift »

kristianc wrote: post #77
oblio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories? And if everyone bunkers up and all that open content dries up starting in 2026, let's say, what happens?

It won't happen, for two reasons. One is that great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway. Finer grained controls over opt-outs would be great (the equivalent of a search engine 'nofollow' would be great and will hopefully come with time). Many kinds of technology faced this kind of tragedy of the commons a…

> [a] great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward

It seems like a lot of the underlying sentiment which was driving that was to contribute to the world and make things better for our fellow people.

Working on OSS software sure doesn't feel as rewarding in the last few years, so I've personally stepped back from 99% of what I do. As have more public people that have worked on OSS for a long time.

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

#337

Post by 9rx »

skydhash wrote: post #328
9rx wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is for styling documents, but nobody (except for maybe designers trying desperately cling to a job) wants every document to have a bespoke style. I want to use a style created by experts that is consistently shared with every other document across the whole of the internet. CSS is fine as a low-level primitive for those experts, but it is not the mechanism the rest of us should be using. However, there is nothing in-between, at least not unless you lean heavily into Javascript, but, again, if you are going to use a programming environment then CSS is pointless anyway. There are much better ways to draw to screens when you have a programming language at your disposal.

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

#338

Post by HDThoreaun »

Jensson wrote: post #309
HDThoreaun wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what critics are for. In our decentralized media environment it is not difficult to find critics for whatever youre interested in

Critics has the same issue, they will also be mostly AI generated. How do you find the good non-AI generated and unpaid critics in the future?

Same as it’s always been. Test the waters until you find someone with a consistent preference that lines up with your own. Personally I don’t really care if a critic is ai as long as its preferences are consistent and align with my own. If you dont find yourself relating to a critics take the great thing is that it’s easy to switch.

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

#339

Post by overgard »

t-writescode wrote: post #204
overgard wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More people building things is straightforwardly good Why is that straightforward? As an example, right now every year on Steam there are thousands of games released. A lot of them are just shovel ware that nobody ever plays, but it does end up hiding actual quality stuff in the noise. Same thing happens in app stores. Gatekeeping that limits opportunity is bad. But gatekeeping around quality is very good. Wanting…

While I strongly agree that heavy LLM usage in industries that actually collect customer data, or make important decisions is INCREDIBLY harmful (with quite a bit of unfortunate regularity), democratizing coding “for all” especially in small, narrow niches, is similar to democratizing art, singing, music, general creating. As long as it’s “for you” or “small time”, there really isn’t a problem at all. The only real d…

I have no issue with people creating things, but if you're going to ask strangers to look at it, I think it's reasonable that there's a bar to clear. I think the bar should be adjusted based on the influx of stuff. Right now there's too much stuff that isn't good, and it drowns out the good stuff. There are plenty of places where people can publish amateur works for their friends to see.

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

#340

Post by skydhash »

9rx wrote: post #337
skydhash wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is for styling documents, but nobody (except for maybe designers trying desperately cling to a job) wants every document to have a bespoke style. I want to use a style created by experts that is consistently shared with every other document across the whole of the internet. CSS is fine as a low-level primitive for those experts, but it is not the mechanism the rest of us should be using. However, there is nothing…

People do want bespoke style (think booklets) and there’s a load of templates (and frameworks) on the internet if you want a standard set of components. The web as a platform was built for documents, and when we try to twist it to do applications, the crack appears. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.

Javascript is used for the Gnome shell and it’s doing a fine job there. And if you paired javascript to something like Tk (as in Tcl/Tk), I guess it would be fine too. The web primitives are just horrible for desktop uses.

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