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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#471

Post by misiek08 »

johnfn wrote: post #444
zarzavat wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

But then you’re just saying “you should spend time on things which are valuable”. Isn’t that obvious?

Not so sure these days tbh. People are trying to shove as much shiny tools as possible instead of sometimes writing 10 vanilla JS lines and proceed to next feature or project. Maybe it’s already exhausted, but left-pad, is-odd, is-even are still my examples for people.

Re: Web development is fun again

#472

Post by BeetleB »

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.

For personal projects, 10x is a lower bound. This year alone I got several projects done that had been on my mind for years.

The baseline isn't what it would have taken had I set aside time to do it.[1] The baseline is reality. I'm easily getting 10x more projects done than in the past.

For work, I totally agree with you.

[1] Although it's often true even in this case. My first such project was done in 15 minutes. Conceptually it was an easy project. Had I known all the libraries, etc out would have taken about an hour. But I didn't, and the research alone would have taken hours.

And most of the knowledge acquired from that research would likely be useless.

Re: Web development is fun again

#473

Post by anakaine »

_ikke_ wrote: post #442
qudat wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

As long as what it says is reliable and not made up.

I feel like we are just covering whataboutism tropes now.

You can absolutely learn from an LLM. Sometimes.documentation sucks and the LLM has learned how to put stuff together feom examples found in unusual places, and it works, and shows what the documentation failed to demonstrate.

And with the people above, I agree - sometimes the fun is in the end process, and sometimes it is just filling in the complexity we do not have time or capacity to grab. I for one just cannot keep up with front end development. Its an insurmountable nightmare of epic proportions. Im pretty skilled at my back end deep dive data and connecting APIs, however. So - AI to help put together a coherent interface over my connectors, and off we go for my side project. It doesnt need to be SOC2 compliant and OWASP proof, nor does it need ISO27001 compliance testing, because after all this is just for fun, for me.

Re: Web development is fun again

#474

Post by duggan »

stephenr wrote: post #359
duggan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

LLMs work very well for a variety of software tasks — we have lots of experience around the industry now.

If you haven’t been convinced by pure argument in 2026 then you probably won’t be. But the great thing is you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.

This isn’t crypto, where everyone using it has a stake in its success. You can just try it, or not.

Re: Web development is fun again

#475

Post by pixelsort »

fullstackchris wrote: post #254
coliveira wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good thing about AI is that it knows all the hundreds of little libraries that keep popping up every few days like a never-ending stream. No longer I need to worry about learning about this stuff, I can just ask the AI what libraries to use for something and it will bring up these dependencies and provide sample code to use them. I don't like AI for coding real algorithms, but I love the fact that I don't need to…

what "AI" are you speaking of? all the current leading LLMs i know of will _not_ do this (i.e web search for latest libraries) unless you explicitely ask

I'll sometimes ask Claude Sonnet 4.5 for JS and TS library recommendations. Not for "latest" or "most popular". For this case, it seems to love recommending promising-looking code from repos released two months ago with like 63 stars.

Re: Web development is fun again

#476

Post by bonesss »

brandensilva wrote: post #212
llmslave2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As you get deeper beyond the starter and bootstrap code it definitely takes a different approach to get value. This is in part because context limits of large code bases and because the knowledge becomes more specialized and the LLM has no training on that kind of code. But people are making it work, it just isn't as black and white.

That’s the issue, though, isn’t it? Why isn’t it black and white? Clear massive productivity gains at Google or MS and their dev armies should be visible from orbit.

Just today on HN I’ve seen claims of 25x and 10x and 2x productivity gains. But none of it starting with well calibrated estimations using quantifiable outcomes, consistent teams, whole lifecycle evaluation, and apples to apples work.

In my own extensive use of LLMs I’m reminded of mouse versus command line testing around file navigation. Objective facts and subjective reporting don’t always line up, people feel empowered and productive while ‘doing’ and don’t like ‘hunting’ while uncertain… but our sense of the activity and measurable output aren’t the same.

I’m left wondering why a 2x Microsoft of OpenAI would ever sell their competitive advantage to others. There’s infinite money to be made exploiting such a tech, but instead we see highschool homework, script gen, and demo ware that is already just a few searches away and downloadable.

LLMs are in essence copy and pasting existing work while hopping over uncomfortable copyright and attribution qualms so devs feel like ‘product managers’ and not charlatans. Is that fundamentally faster than a healthy stack overflow and non-enshittened Google? Over a product lifecycle? … ‘sometimes, kinda’ in the absence of clear obvious next-gen production feels like we’re expecting a horse with a wagon seat built in to win a Formula 1 race.

Re: Web development is fun again

#477

Post by BeetleB »

christophilus wrote: post #236

My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job. It’s pure drudgery, and is mentally taxing. Unless you’re vibe coding, you’re now doing a lot of code review. It’s almost all you’re doing outside of the high-level planning and guidance (which is enjoyable). I’ve settled on reviewing the security boundaries and areas that could affect data leaks / invalid access. And pretty much scan…

> My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job.

The article is about personal projects. The need to review the code is usually 10x less :-)

Re: Web development is fun again

#478

Post by visarga »

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.

Why train to pedal fast when we already got motorcycles? You are preparing for yesterday's needs. There will never be a time when we need to solve this manually like it's 2019. Even in 2019 we would probably have used Google, solving was already based on extensive web resources. While in 1995 you would really have needed to do it manually.

Instead of manual coding training your time is better invested in learning to channel coding agents, how to test code to our satisfaction, how to know if what AI did was any good. That is what we need to train to do. Testing without manual review, because manual review is just vibes, while tests are hard. If we treat AI-generated code like human code that requires a line-by-line peer review, we are just walking the motorcycle.

How do we automate our human in the loop vibe reactions?

Re: Web development is fun again

#479

Post by divan »

Tackling layer of complexity often feels like this. I remember 2010 and my frustration of evergrowing complexity of networking backend programming (C++ mainly), and discovering Go. "Go made programming fun again" was a common phrase at the conferences back then.

I feel similar with web-apps development too, except we're not solving complexity here – we just outsorcing it to "AI-developer". None of the deficiencies of web stack are solved here. The worst part is that this complexity of web stack is mainly _accidental_ – i.e. coming from the tooling, not from the problem domain.

Re: Web development is fun again

#480

Post by kabes »

To me, what sucks the most about programming is dealing with ecosystem issues. You want to write a little tool for personal use, but NPM starts acting out. Then you need to do something in java, which you don't use very often, and you get a giant maven error stack trace which you now need to try to understand. All of this frustration is gone since I use AI and I can focus solely on the thing I'm trying to accomplish.
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