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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#351

Post by lifetimerubyist »

pixl97 wrote: post #272
lifetimerubyist wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I love programming. I even love the business side where you solve real problems for people. What I don't love is the constant pressure to just deliver faster and faster. So forcing these chatbots on us fill a need for the CEOs and manager types that just want to DELIVER DELIVER DELIVER, but the benefit for the people that are forced to use them are marginal at best. There are some valid use cases for LLM-based…

Customers don't buy software based on quality first, they buy on features. Until customers in mass, or regulations demand quality, money will be made on deliveries. If your lucky and can program how you want and take the time you need, then you can focus on the attributes you feel best about.

If you have customers that will put up with things being slow as molasses and crashing al the time, well….can you send some my way because mine won’t STFU about it.

Re: Web development is fun again

#352

Post by spankibalt »

blitz_skull wrote: post #220
arjie wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of us just discovered that the actual programming isn't the fun part for us. It turns out I don't like writing code as much as I thought. I like solving my problems. The activation energy for a lot of things was much higher than it is now. Now it's pretty low. That's great for me. Baby's sleeping, 3d printer is rolling, and I get to make a little bit of progress on something super quick. It's fantastic.

This 1000x! I had a bit of an identity crisis with AI first landed and started producing good code. “If I’m not the man who can type quickly, accurately, and build working programs… WHO AM I?” But as you pointed out, I quickly realized I was never that guy. I was the guy who made problems go away, usually with code. Now I can make so many problems go away, it feels like cheating. As it turns out, writing code isn’t s…

[flagged]

Re: Web development is fun again

#353

Post by Myrmornis »

In particular, and speaking as a backend engineer with zero web design skills, building things with charts/graphs is amazing nowadays! You can literally just operate at the level of "add another line representing the foo data", "add a scatterplot below it", "make them line up", "actually, make it a more reddish pink" etc. In the past I've had opinions about d3 and vega-lite and altair and matplotlib etc and learned how to use those ones at a superficial level at least. In my last personal UI with charts I didn't even ask it what framework it had chosen (chart.js is the answer)

Re: Web development is fun again

#354

Post by int_19h »

llmslave2 wrote: post #158
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm building an AI agent for Godot, and in paid user testing we found the median speed up time to complete a variety of tasks[0] was 2x. This number was closer to 10x for less experienced engineers [0] tasks included making games from scratch and resolving bugs we put into template projects. There's no perfect tasks to test on, but this seemed sufficient

That sounds reasonable to me. AI is best at generating super basic and common code, it will have plenty of training on game templates and simple games. Obviously you cannot generalize that to all software development though.

> That sounds reasonable to me. AI is best at generating super basic and common code

I'm currently using AI (Claude Code) to write a new Lojban parser in Haskell from scratch, which is hardly something "super basic and common". It works pretty well in practice, so I don't think that assertion is valid anymore. There are certainly differences between different tasks in terms of what works better with coding agents, but it's not as simple as "super basic".

Re: Web development is fun again

#355

Post by int_19h »

croemer wrote: post #300
NewsaHackO wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a normal, run of the mill sentence.

I can't prove it of course but I stand by it.

Claiming that use of more complicated words and sentences is evidence of LLM use is just paranoia. Plenty of folk write like OP does, myself included.

Re: Web development is fun again

#356

Post by int_19h »

webdevver wrote: post #9
Havoc wrote: post #5

Ironically I'm thinking the exact opposite. Now I can build stuff without dealing with the chaos in the frontend frameworks ecosystem...

theres a fun "K-shaped" optionality with LLMs: on one hand, its possible to deal with otherwise large API surfaces. but on the other hand, you can 'go oldschool' but with the hot new tools: install ubuntu, launch claude with yolo mode, and just tell it what you want as if it were a sysadmin from the early 2000s/late 90s. both roads very reasonable, but that the old way of doing things is new again is interesting.

And it's not an either-or. For example, I found that a quick way to get a web frontend for a console app is to prompt it to turn that into a CGI app. But said CGI app can still serve HTML with fancy JS and what not, and use modern frameworks for that if desired.

Re: Web development is fun again

#357

Post by int_19h »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #281
phito wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. I've been using blazor server + Claude for project and it just removes all the stupid complexity of having react + a rest API.

I know right? You can share types, you don't need to glue API, etc etc. Why don't people realize that.

People do realize that, which is why such frameworks have first appeared decades ago. It's just that you can't fully paper over the network gap and pretend that it doesn't exist; eventually, the abstraction leaks.

Re: Web development is fun again

#358

Post by AbraKdabra »

I kinda feel the same way, don't get me wrong, I'm a developer at soul level, I absolutely love programming, but I love more getting shit done, automating things, taking the human out of the equation and putting the computer to do it, AI lets me do that. I work in cybersecurity as a WAF admin, my job is 100% that, but I'm also the only developer so anything that needs to be scripted or developed I get to do it. One week I created 4 different scripts with Gemini Canvas to automate some tedious work, it took my I don't know, 3 hours? Instead of 1 or 2 weeks? Yeah sign me in.

Re: Web development is fun again

#359

Post by stephenr »

duggan wrote: post #147
llmslave2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely searching "centre a div" takes less time than prompting and waiting for a response...

Search “centre a div” in Google Wade through ads Skim a treatise on the history of centering content Skim over the “this question is off topic / duplicate” noise if Stack Overflow Find some code on the page Try to map how that code will work in the context of your other layout Realize it’s plain CSS and you’re looking for Tailwind Keep searching Try some stuff until it works Or… Ask LLM. Wait 20-30 seconds. Move on t…

Or, given that OP is presumably a developer who just doesn't focus fully on front end code they could skip straight to checking MDN for "center div" and get a How To article (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/How_to/Layo...) as the first result without relying on spicy autocomplete.

Given how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something like this vs just checking it yourself with well known good reference material.

Re: Web development is fun again

#360

Post by koakuma-chan »

int_19h wrote: post #357
koakuma-chan wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right? You can share types, you don't need to glue API, etc etc. Why don't people realize that.

People do realize that, which is why such frameworks have first appeared decades ago. It's just that you can't fully paper over the network gap and pretend that it doesn't exist; eventually, the abstraction leaks.

Have they? I assume you are talking about PHP, which is not that kind of framework, because you would still have to write JavaScript. It lacks type safety too.
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