The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

The interesting thing to me is that ultimately businesses don't care how it works. They just want it to work.

Which means that you can pick a small framework or two across the frontend and backend and configure or train an AI system on only a tiny fraction of the sum total of web development knowledge and have an effective automated web development system.

Looking at the trajectory of gpt4 to gpt-4o and Llama2 to llama3, the prevalence of multimodality, improved reasoning ability as models get bigger, strong investment in hardware research, etc.

I've been doing web development in some capacity since the late 90s and focused on leveraging generative AI for the last two years. I don't see how any reasonable person can follow this stuff closely and not anticipate AI systems that can literally do the entire job of a small web development team, within just a few years. It was actually possible to build a version of that two years ago, and some of the latest attempts are very polished, if lacking in some level of functionality. But that is coming.

Every single job that we have today will be automated. I assume they means that people will be left basically herding swarms of AI agents. For a few years. But it won't be very long before you really need an AI to control your agent swarms or even understand what they are doing.

I can't begin to imagine life as just a ... database guy, or a backend guy or just a frontend guy. Perhaps it needs to be aligned in everyone's eyes that we cannot be as good at databases as one that spends most of his time doing databases. But there are pros and cons to our kind of knowledge.

I can argue pro and con SQL vs. NOSQL, to the limits of my ability, or argue for this frontend framework or that, or consider various languages or architectures for the backend, or discuss about how we'll deploy the production version of whatever it is that we're building, or how we'll do development side CI/CD and so on and so forth. What am I? I'm open to the idea that I'm a fraud, but I like to consider myself a full stack.

Very recently, I had the displeasure of coming back from a 3-weeks long vacation and discovering that the rest of the team added Angular Material on the project, and started to sprinkle it everywhere in the code.

Despite me (the only front-end guy in a team otherwise constituted only fullstack devs that are really more backend devs dabbling in frontend) asking them to not add Angular Material or any 'UI library', because this project is very simple, a mobile-only classic layout with a few simple forms.

Nothing in the designer's mockup for this project looked like Material Design, nothing; But since Angular Material is marketed as basically being part of Angular, then they told me that it was "good practice", and "a way to save time". As a result, instead having a clean DOM with a few classes and basically just a border-radius on the buttons, they did tons of ugly CSS to overwrite the Material styling that they themselves added, all in the explicit aim for them to avoid doing any CSS at all, ironically.

Just to reiterate, it's really a super simple app with a sticky header and footer, some form with a few borders, and some rounded buttons. I already did for them the main layout (it was basically a dozen or so CSS lines), but they ignored it all to add underneath tons of stupid Material components.

I mean look at this crap:

https://material.angular.io/components/toolbar/overview

is a component that was actually imported in the project, which:

- does not have any JS behavior

- does not handle positioning (you can do it yourself with flex! How powerful!)

- does not have any ARIA role attached.

- but DO have a default color and background, thanks to the customizable Material palette!

In other word, it's a fucking with a default background, but props to the Angular Material marketing and the mountain of content marketing out there to brainwash hordes of webdev into thinking that it's simpler to import an external dependency than to specify a background in one class.

Another example, here is the doc for the '' component: https://material.angular.io/components/divider/overview

I understand why a Google designer would specify such element in a plateform-agnostic way, but for everyone else who's working in a web project that only used Material to 'save time', then why the hell would you import and use this component instead of just using the native tag available since the nineties ?

It's easier I guess, oh except for the planned migration to Material M3 that you will have to do in a few years if you want to be able to upgrade to the latest version of Angular, but I guess that adding some borders and some margins is just incredibly hard.

The saddest part of all is that I love doing frontend dev in general, and as the articles point out the fundamentals of HTML/CSS/JS are incredibly stable and retro-compatible, yet all the ecosystem keep piling layers and layers of crap all in the sake of 'DX' and of 'good practice' (that seems to change every 6 months).

I do believe in the CSS case is that it looks too simple, deceptively even, so one can dabble in it without knowing the fundamentals, and so I believe that looks like CSS is broken the first time a junior dev has something with "position: absolute" that isn't positionned the way they expect, or when they find themselves coding in JS something that could be done with a handy CSS selector, out of ignorance of the available selectors.

As a result of this apparent simplicity of CSS, I think that there is a general reluctance to 'respect' the language enough to try to learn it really, which makes for more piles of broken CSS riddled with !important, and thus more people believing that CSS and HTML is fundamentally crap.

EDIT: I'm not critizising Angular Material in particular. I the React ecosystem I actually saw some 'UI component library' proposing elements to have bold or italic text. Yeeesh.