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Web development is fun again

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Re: Web development is fun again

#571

Post by css_apologist »

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…

LLMs are really showing how different programmers are from one another

i am in your camp, i get 0 satisfaction out of seeing something appear on the screen which i don't deeply understand

i want to feel the computer as i type, i've recently been toying with turning off syntax highlighting and LSPs (not for everyone), and i am surprised at the lack of distractions and feeling of craft and joy it brings me

Re: Web development is fun again

#572

Post by codr7 »

dcre wrote: post #565
mbirth wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is just not true. I have wasted many hours looking for answers to hard-to-phrase questions and learned very little from the process. If an LLM can get me the same result in 30 seconds, it's very hard for me to see that as a bad thing. It just means I can spend more time thinking about the thing I want to be thinking about. I think to some extent people are valorizing suffering itself.

Learning means friction, it's not going to happen any other way.

Re: Web development is fun again

#573

Post by codr7 »

popalchemist wrote: post #489
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.

Literally shipping a vide-coded feature as my baby sleeps, while reading this comment thread. It's the wild west again. I love it.

Maybe you can tell us the name of the software so we can avoid it?

Re: Web development is fun again

#574

Post by naasking »

alwillis wrote: post #570
naasking wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers can learn a new programming language in a few weeks to months of just using it. If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed.

> If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed. It's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one. Frankly, it's not a priority for most of them to learn CSS; they don't see it as a "real" programming language; therefore it's not worth their time.

> It's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one.

It's not like blaming the bicycle, that's the whole point of my analogy to programming languages. Like I said, learning a new programming language in a few weeks of regular use is a common experience. This also happens with bikes, because you can try a few things, lose balance, make a few intuitive adjustments, and iterate easily.

This just doesn't work with CSS. There are so many pitfalls, corner cases and reasoning is non-compositional and highly contextual. That's the complete opposite of learning to ride a bike or learning a new programming language.

You literally do need to read like, a formal specification of CSS to really understand it, and even then you'll regularly get tripped up. People just learn to stick to a small subset of CSS for which they've managed to build a predictable model for, which is why we got toolkits like Bootstrap.

Edit: this also explains why things like Tailwind are popular: it adds a certain amount of predictability and composition to CSS. Using CSS was way worse in the past when browser compatibility was worse, but it's still not a great experience.

Re: Web development is fun again

#575

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

I'm trying to catch up with AI but it's difficult because most articles I find are kinda vague and there is a lack of clear examples.

It's always about prompting or how AI "is great" yadi yada but hardly any step by step examples.

I can easily ask gemini CLI to produce code for example. But how to work with AI in an existing codebase isn't obvious at all.

It seems also that for any serious use you need a paid subscription? It seems like the free models just can't handle large codebases.

Re: Web development is fun again

#576

Post by o0o0o »

ImPleadThe5th wrote: post #344

I enjoy when: Things are simple. Things are a complicated, but I can learn something useful. I do not enjoy when: Things are arbitrarily complicated. Things are a complicated, but I'm just using AI to blindly get something done instead of learning. Things are arbitrarily complicated and not incentivized to improve because now "everyone can just use AI" It feels like instead of all stepping back and saying "we need to…

Don't you enjoy the fact that some staff is actually _done_?

Re: Web development is fun again

#577

Post by phendrenad2 »

Even with AI, web development is not fun. Web development was fun while the web was the wild west, and the rent-seekers hadn't gotten their hooks into it. These days you're likely to be delisted from Google because your site isn't responsive, or there's a 500 on a page or two. And then, for your patience and dedication, you get sued by a scummy lawyer who looks for sites with poor WCAG conformance. Congratulations!

Re: Web development is fun again

#578

Post by xnx »

Akronymus wrote: post #536
CamperBob2 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And I don't want to use tools I don't understand at least to some degree. I always get nervous when I do something but don't know why I do that something

Depends on what level of abstraction you're comfortable with. I have no problem driving a car I didn't build.

Re: Web development is fun again

#579

Post by Akronymus »

xnx wrote: post #578
Akronymus wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't want to use tools I don't understand at least to some degree. I always get nervous when I do something but don't know why I do that something

Depends on what level of abstraction you're comfortable with. I have no problem driving a car I didn't build.

I didnt build my car either. But I understand a bit of most of the main mechanics, like how the ABS works, how powered steering does, how an ICE works and so on.

Re: Web development is fun again

#580

Post by onemoresoop »

codr7 wrote: post #572
dcre wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just not true. I have wasted many hours looking for answers to hard-to-phrase questions and learned very little from the process. If an LLM can get me the same result in 30 seconds, it's very hard for me to see that as a bad thing. It just means I can spend more time thinking about the thing I want to be thinking about. I think to some extent people are valorizing suffering itself.

Learning means friction, it's not going to happen any other way.

Some of it is friction, some of it is play. With AI you can get faster to the play part where you do learn a fair bit. But in a sense I agree that less is retained. I think that is not because of lack of friciton, instead is the fast pace of getting what you want now. You no longer need to make a conscious effort to remember any of it because it's effortless to get it again with AI if you ever need it. If that's what you mean by friction then I agree.
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