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Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

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Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#81

Post by alex_suzuki »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #24
23david wrote: post #7

I think it's more likely to cause a lost Decade of people not going into CS or tech due to lack of entry-level jobs. Maybe next time there's a boom and the pendulum of the power dynamic between management and labor swings more towards the workers, tech workers will unionize or organize better. I think overall it will benefit the industry because these boom and bust cycles for employment are just not healthy.

There is no guarantee that there will be a boom again. Some jobs disappear. Maybe we'll really only need a handful of elite engineers who continue advancing the foundational tools we use (kernels, databases, hyperscale low level cloud products, drivers, etc.) and the rest of "programmers" and "software engineers" will be replaced by "prompt engineers". With a new generation mostly unable to read and reason about sour…

But how will the current crop of “elite engineers” be replaced, when they inevitably age out?

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#82

Post by neuroblaster »

fantasizr wrote: post #47
neuroblaster wrote: post #33

Very interesting, i didn't know that frontend developers experienced deskilling before. I thought that slop was the usual way of doing things in frontend (or backend). Apparently deskilled people are making it look like this is normal and it supposed to be so. But i can relate to that. Another examples of deskilling would be, of course, Java, and a more modern example - Rust. That said, i don't think deskilling is so…

Everyone had a chance to learn vanilla js from the mozilla docs but using jquery was much much simpler. Concede that jquery is more difficult than prompting. The issue for me is that prompting a front end and everything looks exactly the same. More cookie cutter than what wordpress and wix offered

Right. So we are stuck with the jquery and wordpress forever. Because this is THE cookie cutter and it's good enough.

But situation was exactly the same before the AI. You would still get your wordpress, your React frontend and Java Spring backend.

AI doesn't change anything, it just takes the job of a poor slopper who made a living by coding React frontends. Anthropic just took their job, that's it, and you don't see the difference.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#83

Post by emodendroket »

I mean, maybe it was a "lost decade" from the perspective of frontend developers, but I can't say I'm nostalgic for an age where everyone is handrolling everything from legacy browser support to responsive designs and I'm hoping they have a good understanding of all these things because the average page would be much worse than it is with everyone using these libraries.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#84

Post by Filligree »

bakugo wrote: post #28
Filligree wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well. To make the obvious counterargument, “then you shouldn’t be creating websites at all”. I don’t actually believe this, but I know people who do. Some would add “shouldn’t be allowed to”.

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.

Keep in mind these are two different things. Not all websites need to be accessible.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#85

Post by emodendroket »

fny wrote: post #50
kristianc wrote: post #10

I'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.

You could argue that most users do not notice or care about this at all so it's a completely reasonable sacrifice to make to have rich applications.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#86

Post by cyanydeez »

kristianc wrote: post #10

I'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'…

being able to increase both a11y and i18n even if imperfect are definitely a LLM value add; the problem is simply business. This doesn't make the heat->cash register bling.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#87

Post by sevenzero »

lqet wrote: post #71

This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS…

On the other hand, using frameworks later on was a good attempt to standardize things. Having some homegrown GUI nobody knows how to work with isn't an advantage either. Personally I refuse things that "feel" too big (Nuxt/Next), but like Vue... Currently though, I want to get rid of most Javascript so I'll work my way to HTMX or Alpine type solutions with server side templates. Personally the less tech I use the better, there was a time where you had all kinds of bullshit in a web app prior to even adding a single line of custom code.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#88

Post by nailer »

customguy wrote: post #15
kristianc wrote: post #10

I'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'…

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well. No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then? > More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make. That I agree with. The more the me…

> They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then?

That’s a good question but I suspect when new technologies come out, the normally indecipherable specs released by industry groups (which is why we needed blogs) will be deciphered by LLMs. Not saying this is good or bad (it’s likely both) just saying it.

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#89

Post by m132 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #80
m132 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acce…

> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend. The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for thi…

I can somewhat see your point, but it is generally accepted that a wrong ARIA is worse than none, and LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing, the more decent ones heavily emphasize in-depth human code reviews.

If our hypothetical developer hasn't used any accessibility-related tags before, what chance is there that those parts of the website will receive adequate testing?

Re: Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

#90

Post by emodendroket »

mcmcmc wrote: post #65
kristianc wrote: post #10

I'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?

Suppose the choice is between software that does what you want, but isn't very optimized, and the software not existing at all, rather than between shoddy and beautiful software that both do what you want, and maybe it will make more sense to you.
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