I have a slightly different take on deskilling argument. I don't think AI is going to deskill. Someone who has spent 10 years working in any field before AI is not going to get lose too much. Yesterday I sat down to solve a medium hackerrank problem without any assistance (code complete, AI etc) and it took me 10-15 minutes to get into that mode but i was able to do it comfortably just like how i used to do it pre-chatgpt. AI might unskill the younger workforce which will enter the field, aka they will never learn the way we did.
Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
61–70 of 352 posts
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#62I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…
"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.
And the irony is that the author of that talk spent that same decade busy shoving as much Javascript into browsers as possible. After all he's the originator and the main promoter of web components where every single thing including built-in browser functionality like form participation has to be done in Javascript.
Edit: There's not just one lost decade of the web. There's the browser wars and IE stagnant dominance. There's the 2010s with millions of man hours spent on web components and starving other directions of resources or actively hindering them (e.g. scoped css was continuously postoponed because it's highly incompatible with Shadow DOM) while pushing everything into Javascript (and partly breaking JS e.g. with the bolted-on class-based OOP).
It remains to see if Google's complete dominance breaks the web further
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#63You talk about deskilling. But are these skills even relevant to the ultimate goal of producing a web page according to the design specification? Should we have been worried about the "deskilling" that happened when we transitioned from punch cards to high level languages?
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what went so wrong that "if you don't understand [thing] you shouldn't be building [thing]" is now considered a controversial statement.
That's not what I said, I said I likely understand it less than a 635B parameter LLM, and that using the LLM as a shortcut to that knowledge is something I'd consider perfectly acceptable. I might even become better at it through using the LLM.
You need a certain understanding to be able to judge whether the output is adequate. I think the argument is against people who lack that understanding.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#65I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…
> More people building things is straightforwardly good
I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#66I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…
Exactly. Nobody wants smalltalk programmers or IIS whisperers. You just have to embrace the idea that your skills become worthless every five years and move on.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#67I have a slightly different take on deskilling argument. I don't think AI is going to deskill. Someone who has spent 10 years working in any field before AI is not going to get lose too much. Yesterday I sat down to solve a medium hackerrank problem without any assistance (code complete, AI etc) and it took me 10-15 minutes to get into that mode but i was able to do it comfortably just like how i used to do it pre-ch…
The term applies to the skills required from workers, not to how the skills of an individual evolve over time. The argument is that AI lowers the skill requirements for software development, and therefore less skilled workers will displace the more skilled ones because they are cheaper, as (allegedly) happened in front end over the past decade.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#68I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that'…
> this is largely accidental complexity. Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem. Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other c…
> I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem.
That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces. You can barely do styled text.
CSS and HTML are literally littered with accidental, ad-hoc, badly thought-out and badly designed one-off solutions, often to problems no one asked for. There's a reason it took until 2026 to animate `height: auto`. There's a reason why `article` "semantic" element has to be used when you display product cards or widgets. There's a reason why CSS scoping has been stuck in limbo for 10+ years. There's a reason...
The web is one of humanity's greatest achievements. But let's not pretend that it's not a textbook study in accidental complexity.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#69> A lot of programmers may not know this, but frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing
As someone who didn’t really know that being a front-end dev putatively doesn’t involve thinking about those things anymore, I think that list conflates a couple of different things.
Things like the differences between browsers and CSS/HTML quirks, needed to wrangle a document markup language into creating user interfaces, are accidental complexity caused by particular path dependencies, and if they can be abstracted out, that’s a great thing.
Accessibility, interface design, performance, and other things related to user experience, on the other hand? Those are mostly orthogonal. A UI framework can raise (or in some cases lower) the bottom in the sense of facilitating reuse of (hopefully well-designed) components, but no framework is going to make your UI accessible or well designed by itself.
In the fabled past, frontend development didn’t require you to be highly qualified in these matters – web UIs were simply terrible, mostly. High skill level was not required because nobody expected anything from web UIs beyond the barest core functionality.
There was UI programming before the web [citation needed]. In a sense it was "deskilled" because you used a "framework" aka the OS windowing and widget libraries rather than drawing rectangles manually (except in some special cases like games where very custom UI is desired – but those custom controls invariably have roughly 0% of the UX affordances provided by standard ones). Back then, Visual Basic and other RAD tools (anyone still remember that acronym?) were front line of "deskilling", but honestly WYSIWYG visual design is still one of the best ways to create UIs, it’s just rarely done these days for various reasons.
Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?
#70We already had a phase of "deskilled" frontend development: Adobe Flash. Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required. Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript) you could get full interactivity, and animations were fully editable in UI. Sure, all of this came at a terrible price: no accessibility, no SEO discovery, huge loading times. But it also creat…
Right. And Flash wouldn't end until Jobs won't come out on stage and say that Flash is eating the battery and Apple won't support Flash in their next iPhone, then Flash just ceased to exist. Apparently nobody needed innovative frontends anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is no break pedal on this stuff, it just rolls down the hill until eventually it doesn't. It's a runaway process that feeds itself.