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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#421

Post by zarzavat »

johnfn wrote: post #343
zarzavat wrote: post #342

Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA. If you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love.

So you’re skipping any sort of a build pipeline? You’re not going to bundle, so no code minification? You’re going to skip tests ? And everyone who uses these things just does them to “feel grown up” and not for any particular benefit or purpose beyond that?

No. My point is more nuanced than that. All of the things in the article have value to someone, but their value to you is defined in terms of how much better they make your product.

If you spend so much time on the cumulation of product-adjacent activities that you don't make a good product, then their cumulative value to you was negative.

But I do, personally, love a good build system. The value is extremely high and it only takes 10 minutes to set one up.

Re: Web development is fun again

#422

Post by mr-ron »

Last paragraph resonated so deeply with me. Especially this:

```It’s also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that’s required to build anything. It’s the fact you get to build something out of nothing, writing code was just how you got there. And with today’s tooling, that saves a ton of time.```

I never really related with folks that code for beauty or are put off by how AI does the actual coding. The beauty is actually creating something, solving real problems, shipping, and (hopfully) winning. It might be cliche, but it is incredibly true for me to say that using AI feels like a superpower.

Re: Web development is fun again

#423

Post by phamilton »

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…

It all comes back to "Do more because of AI" rather than "Do less because of AI".

Getting back into coding is doing more. Updating an old project to the latest libraries is doing more.

It often feels ambiguous. Shipping a buggy, vibe-coded MVP might be doing less. But getting customer feedback on day one from a real tangible product can allow you to build a richer and deeper experience through fast iteration.

Just make sure we're doing more, not less, and AI is a wonderful step forward.

Re: Web development is fun again

#424

Post by spankibalt »

mbirth wrote: post #415
chung8123 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI.

The difference is that after you’ve googled it for ½ hour, you’ve learned something. If you ask an LLM to do it for you, you’re none the wiser.

I don't think "learning" is a goal here...

Re: Web development is fun again

#425

Post by marcosdumay »

peteforde wrote: post #413
marcosdumay wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have been very successful. After we got a hit from security requirements and broke the Microsoft monopoly on browsers, web development have only got more and more potentially simple. If you or some other person don't program in the way that makes it simple, it's not our communitary problem. What matters is that the potential is there.

I think that you are confusing browser engine maturity and developer ecosystem, which means that you're having your own conversation.

You pick the ecosystem you'll use, the only one forced on you is the browser. If you decide to use one that makes your life harder, that's again not a communitary problem.

Re: Web development is fun again

#426

Post by fartfeatures »

jimbokun wrote: post #397
alwillis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the invention of the printing press in 1450 created a similar disruption, economic panic and institutional fear similar to what we're experiencing now: For centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat. Job Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for ba…

Well the lesson is that for all of us who invested a lot of time and effort to become good software developers the value of our skill set is now near zero.

Many of the same skills that we honed by investing that time and effort into being good software developers make us good AI prompters, we simply moved another layer of abstraction up the stack.

Re: Web development is fun again

#427

Post by fartfeatures »

gamewithnoname wrote: post #408
stryan wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions. I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argume…

Exactly. What makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the "providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzzines…

Having AI working with and for me is hugely exciting. My creativity is not something an AI can outmode. It will augment it. Right now ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive. Soon, ideas will be more valuable and implementation will be cheap. The economy is not zero sum nor is creativity.

Re: Web development is fun again

#428

Post by isodev »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #122
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.

I accept there are productivity gains, but it's hard to take "10x" seriously. It's such a tired trope. Is no one humble enough to be a meager 2.5x engineer?

There is no x is because LLM performance is non deterministic. You get slop out at varying degrees of quality and so your job shifts from writing to debugging.

Re: Web development is fun again

#429

Post by ragequittah »

spankibalt wrote: post #352
blitz_skull wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I imagine this same argument happening when people stopped using machine code and assembly en masse and started using FORTRAN or COBOL. You don't really know what you're doing unless you're spending the effort I spent!

Re: Web development is fun again

#430

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

Look, yeah one shotting stuff makes generic UIs, impressive feat but generic

its getting years of sideprojects off the ground for me

now in languages I never learned or got professional validation for: rust, lua for roblox … in 2 parallel terminal windows and Claude Code instances

all while I get to push frontend development further and more meticulously in a 3rd. UX heavy design with SVG animations? I can do that now, thats fun for me

I can make experiences that I would never spend a business Quarter on, I can rapidly iterate in designs in a way I would never pay a Fiverr contractor or three for

for me the main skill is knowing what I want, and its entirely questionable about whether that’s a moat at all but for now it is because all those “no code” seeking product managers and ideas guys are just enamored that they can make a generic something compile

I know when to point out the AI contradicted itself in a code concept, when to interrupt when its about to go off the rails

So far so great and my backend deployment proficiency has gone from CRUD-app only to replicating, understanding and superpassing what the veteran backend devs on my teams could do

I would previously call myself full stack, but knowing where my limits in understanding are

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