Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 658 posts

Re: Web development is fun again

#431

Post by alwillis »

stryan wrote: post #381
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…

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…

The point being missed is the printing press led to tens of millions of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.

So far, when a new technology is introduced that people were initially afraid of, end up creating a whole new set of jobs and industries.

Re: Web development is fun again

#432

Post by qudat »

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.

Wrong. I will spend 30 minutes having the LLM explain every line of code and why it's important, with context-specific follow-up questions. An LLM is one of the best ways to learn ...

Re: Web development is fun again

#433

Post by CamperBob2 »

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 want to waste time learning how to install and configure ephemeral tools that will be obsolete before I ever need to use them again.

Re: Web development is fun again

#434

Post by shevy-java »

It sounds like a first april entry.

Things such as:

"They’re far from perfect, but claude and codex gave me the leverage I desperately needed."

Yikes. I most definitely don't want AI to take away abilities.

I do kind of approach web development differently. Rather than static HTML and CSS for the most part (which I, of course, also use), ruby acts as primary wrapper and I treat HTML tags like objects as well as everything else. So I kind of describe a web page on a (one level higher) layer. It is not 100% perfect as some things are messy (also due to legacy, some of the code I started writing 20 years ago, updated some of it but other parts need to be upated too, which is only possible when time permits); but even with this in mind, I simply could never go back to using the web with HTML and CSS as a primary means to describe web-related content. It would just be very inefficient use of my time.

> When AI generates code, I know when it’s good and when it’s not.

Ok - now I know this is a first april entry indeed.

> There’s mental space for creativity in building software again.

Which, of course, would not make any sense. Now the article is a first april entry, but if we were to assume he would write this for real, why would AI have taken away creativity? People can still think on their own. In theory they could have the great ideas - and AI autogenerates all necessary code. So this use case would not be that terrible IF it were to work perfectly well. I don't see it work that way right now. AI often just is a mega-spammer everywhere. It spams out crap, some of which is useful, but the default is crap.

> AI really has made web development fun again.

Not really. But I also think that the whole web-stack should be simplified and streamlined. Instead what I see is the opposite happening. Complexity rises. And JavaScript sucks so much it is really unbearable. You can do many useful things in JavaScript, but as a language it is a true clown language. I used to think I dislike PHP the most, but I no longer use PHP yet I have to use JavaScript. Every second line of code I ask myself why this joke could have ever become popular. Even Java evolved and got better. JavaScript appears to have gotten more stupid over the years.

Re: Web development is fun again

#435

Post by spankibalt »

ragequittah wrote: post #429
spankibalt wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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!

> "I imagine this same argument happening when people stopped using machine code and assembly en masse and started using FORTRAN or COBOL."

Yeah, certainly. But since this has nothing to do with my argument, which was an answer to the very existential question of a (postulated) non-coder, and not a comment on a forgotten pissing contest between coders, it's utterly irrelevant.

:(

Re: Web development is fun again

#436

Post by vagab0nd »

agumonkey wrote: post #130
101008 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and de…

Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs) I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing…

My prediction is that software will be so cheap that very soon, economy of scale gives way to maximum customization which means everyone writes their own software. There will be no software market in the future.

Re: Web development is fun again

#437

Post by disfictional »

devmor wrote: post #136

You were never able to stop using the techniques you learned, and you were always able to keep up with minimal effort - you didn’t need to learn any frameworks. I’m glad you’re having fun, but you didn’t need AI to overcome some laborious hurdle. The only hurdle that existed was your own laziness.

Laziness, or job search, or parenting, or health issues, or caregiving, or something else. It's not a binary stay-current-or-you're-lazy situation, it's that the entire industry is moving to shorter timelines, smaller teams, and more technical complexity for web projects simultaneously. LLMs are a huge dopamine hit for short term gains when you're spinning plates day after day. The question is what the ecosystem will look like when everybody's been using LLMs as a stopgap for an extended period of time.

Re: Web development is fun again

#438

Post by girvo »

phil21 wrote: post #385
jimbokun wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is whether or not you find computers interesting and enjoy understanding how they work. For the people who just want to solve some problem unrelated to computers but require a computer for some part of the task, yes AI would be more “fun”.

I don’t find this to be true. I enjoy computers quite a bit. I enjoy the hardware, scaling problems, theory behind things, operating systems, networking, etc. Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot. I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the…

See, I do though. I enjoy the act, the craft of programming. It's intrinsically fun for me, and has been for the 25 years I've been doing it at this point, and it still hasn't stopped being fun!

Different strokes I guess

Re: Web development is fun again

#439

Post by disfictional »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #163

I have this suspicion that the people who say they have 10x productivity gains from AI might largely see improvements from a workflow change which fixes their executive dysfunction. Back in the day I never had any issue just sitting down and coding something out for 4 hours straight. So I don’t think LLMs feel quite as big for me. But I can see the feeling of offloading effort to a computer when you have trouble gett…

LLMs as a body double for executive dysfunction is a great insight. I see chronic examples of corporate-sponsored executive dysfunction: striped calendars, constant pings and interruptions, emergency busywork, fire drills. It's likely that LLMs aren't creating productivity as much as they're removing starting inhibition and helping to maintain the thread through context switching. What's presented as a magical tool, which LLMs can be in the areas you mentioned, is also presented as a panacea for situations that simply don't promote good programming hygiene.

Re: Web development is fun again

#440

Post by girvo »

jszymborski wrote: post #20

I remember those times, and it was a lot of fun, but there's really nothing stopping you from running a LAMP stack today, writing PHP without frameworks and with manual SQL queries. In fact, it's a lot more fun for me to approach this today. Modern PHP is a joy. MariaSQL is very much MySQL (and switching to Postgres isn't exactly a bump in complexity). It's way easier to write code that won't get injected. If you wan…

> ehem, the real OGs used Fireworks

Man I missed Macromedia Fireworks. Such a great time! I think I had the last bundle before the Adobe buy-out, Macromedia Studio I think it was called? So good!

Post reply on HN