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The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

nolanlawson.com

81–90 of 282 posts

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#82

Prompt: Answer without searching the internet: Woah! Must it discard all pre-training as well? It already slurped "the internet". You can't seriously say it doesn't count!

there seems to be at least one service that your LLM can find if it searches the internet (e.g. in my case "best rental API") that poisons your context into thinking that that one service is the definitive and only available API for that data

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#83
post #13

In a related but less public way, I've found myself less motivated to write internal documentation at work. It feels like in a lot of cases, it'd be better for the reader to throw Claude at the codebase to explain things. A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. While I'm quite good at highlighting the most important insights and non-obvious traits of a system, I'd still be guessing what…

> A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date.

Good documentation does not explain "the how", it captures "the why."

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. Is that legal... ? I admit I don't know much about graphic design is contracted.

Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.

That's only true if the picture was specifically commissioned by the company.

If it's a stock image or a licensed image, they need a license to alter the original image.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing the code was never the interesting part.

>Typing the code was never the interesting part. But solving hard problems and developing systems intuition was. If you're trying to tell me that people working on code bases predominantly written by AI are still solving hard problems themselves, or understand the systems the AI is building, I think they're lying to themselves.

I work on a codebase with a lot of math and I've both learned and implemented a bunch of things that were beyond my level before I could iterate on it with AI. Same for binary reverse engineering. On the other fixing tedious bugs by hand and typing the code in is not something I miss at all.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother has a psychology practice and wanted to update her 20 year old website. I did the first few prompts (single static page, basically a brochure, don’t worry about hosting) into ChatGPT to get her started and a few days later she sent me a .zip which I uploaded. Only took a while because she wasn’t paying for ChatGPT so had to wait for the free limit to reset quite a few times. But overall it was super empower…

Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.

> I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20

If it because the poster's mother dislikes the idea of subscriptions, then I totally get it. (Though I admit I have no idea if this has anything to do with the poster's mother's decision.)

I'll go out of my way as much as I can to avoid signing up for anything that is a subscription because of how horrible the entire corporate world has abused subscription dark patterns over the past couple of decades.

These days just the packaging of anything into a subscription makes me assume there is intent to screw people out of money.

While signing up for LLM usage is fairly low risk as far as subscription lock-in goes, someone non-technical might not be aware of that fact.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam. It is, indeed. The C-Suites at every company are making plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmU9uovmT2A

Hilarious! But more real... Giacomo fails to take into account the concept of when OpenAI decides to create an audited financial service that guarantees that their output is valid. ChatGPT Work is already a beginning of that future.

That's like saying Google offering GMail ended webmail - there are still plenty of webmail services around: some better, some worse, some more specialised. The same will be true of most sectors.

AI is another tool in the toolbox, not magic. It's not about being pro or against it, it's here already (hey, we sell it!) and obviously it will continue to get better; but it won't magically solve everything for $2.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#88
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilarious! But more real... Giacomo fails to take into account the concept of when OpenAI decides to create an audited financial service that guarantees that their output is valid. ChatGPT Work is already a beginning of that future.

That's like saying Google offering GMail ended webmail - there are still plenty of webmail services around: some better, some worse, some more specialised. The same will be true of most sectors. AI is another tool in the toolbox, not magic. It's not about being pro or against it, it's here already (hey, we sell it!) and obviously it will continue to get better; but it won't magically solve everything for $2.

i've written smtp servers.

it has the best spam control on the planet.

i'd never use anything else.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#89
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken with the true arrogance of someone who has no idea about the real world of finance. When your software has to produce legal documents, satisfy auditors, and certify a bunch of things to shareholders and governments, I'm sorry but your $200 vibecoded hack is not going to cut it. You will have to get it certified, to get it audited, to get it secured according to this and that legislation, to prove where it gets…

You sound like someone who was adversed to cell phone cameras taking over film. Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam.

Bro, "AI" can't even program decently. It's still, to this day, worse than every human I've ever worked with. The idea that it's going to take over every industry is laughable.

Re: The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

#90

Being a programmer in the era of AI now means configuring the AI and run environments to produce the sought result, than manipulating the code itself. It's like how C runs on top of assembly.

It's nothing at all how like C runs on top of assembly. C has semantics. Code means something without ever being run. You can check in your source code and (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. Try checking in only your prompts and nothing else. Just the…

> (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today.

> See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code

I mean... yes, but also no. C is actually a great example. So much of the code we wrote is about manipulating the specifics of that specific computer system we happen to be using at that exact moment. Everything from cpu specific instructions to how the ram behaves or how much of it there is all the way up to how library functions operate at any given point in time.

And in relatively short amounts of time, it can all change out from underneath you.

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