The asteroid currently hitting front end web development
nolanlawson.comWe gave a university class called "Advanced JS" and it was going for more than 13 years. Some years we had 30, others 50, recently more like 18 students. In 2026 though, I see very little reason to continue to do so.
What am I going to teach them? How to run Codex or CC? Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? We have always considered ourselves forward-thinking with live coding, paired programming, AI-assisted visual artefacts.
And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided we stop giving these lectures. Everyone autodidact themselves, I dont care anymore.
> And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided
Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating?
Personally, I felt similarly once the people I'm mentoring started using CC and Codex and similar stuff, as a lot of the questions they asked me were easily answerable by the agent, so I guess I had a brief moment of "But what value do I even provide in the world anymore?".
I ended up kind of restructuring what I'm trying to teach, and instead of getting them more exposed to the mechanics of software engineering, I've started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, all still related to software engineering of course, but I basically try to ask myself what I can teach them that no agent/model could, and do that stuff.
I even started introducing mentees to each other (not sure why I didn't before but alas), and have them collaborate on projects together, and figure out what works/not in collaborations with others, as no model can teach you that, as just another example. It's surfacing a whole new host of issues to work through, so seems to work fine :)
> Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating?
well, in 2025, not sure if related to agentic dev, but very likely, there is a very well felt drop in attention. also we figured there is a massive misproportion between people who have already used GPTs alongside classic dev, and those who have adopted or been exposed to agentic dev.
my surprise is that these people, being 3rd and 4th graders, were not equally exposed to harness-based dev, even though most are already employed on certain roles in actual companies.
> started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things,
well I agree this is important, but it is not a class in JS anymore. told the faculty staff we need to reinvent the program, and they are not even aware yet how damaging this impact is.
in all honesty - nobody knows at present moment what skills are needed to teach to people. besides, with LLMs, everyone curious enough can teach themselves.
so this changes massively the whole idea of knowledge transfer done by humans, does it not? we should teach other skills, not the technical trivia. i can give many examples, but this is going to eventually become very long post.
...
to add injury to insult, one of the team members invested early on in a 512GB mac studio, put some harness with Qwen on it and is currently collecting trading signals and doing finance. he expressed doubt there's more to do for him in the area, and he was perhaps one of the top notch ES6 devs I've ever known, with vast experience in UI and a long list of contracts (many of them got cancelled recently)!
So while many complain about their job security (due to AI), I can tell you the whole academia is nosing down rapidly. add to this the fact that most compute is concentrated in private enterprises - same entities that slurp my students afterwards and never say thanks.
If you were just teaching technical trivia, I would have considered that teacher a bad teacher even in the 90s.
> Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating?
Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes.
I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping up on basics or tedious tasks makes the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.
> Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes.
Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes? Not often my real-life experience pretty much differs 180 with what I read here, but this is one of those cases.
> the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something
Yeah, this is like 50% of all the developers in the software engineering ecosystem, if not more. We're all riding the highs of past successes then extrapolate that over our entire lives and future work.
>Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes?
Assuming these behaviors often come from a place of insecurity then I think the normal behavior of programmers may be modified in the case they are in a university class trying to learn from a teacher, because then the programmer's natural fear of saying something and being shown to be an idiot will keep them quiet unless they are very very sure.
> Hah, are we talking about the same profession here? Programmers, famously known for understanding what they don't know, and the ones who know stuff seldom were assholes?
I was a TA the whole time I was in university, for computer science and computer engineering classes. I don't remember any of my students being an asshole even once, and I think this is the kind of thing I (unfortunately) would remember.
Keyword is students, 5-10 years ago I was involved in teaching non-programmers how to develop so however people act once in the profession is irrelevant to this discussion really.
> Keyword is students
Yeah, I think this is fair, I was thinking professionally and don't have much experience of academic students in that way, from either side. Clearly feels like I misunderstood/mistook the wider context here, so thanks for the correction!
> insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.
inevitable, and we cannot close our eyes about it. but okay, lets say a single asshole does not resume the whole group. then again - it is very difficult to convince anyone in 2026 (myself included!) he needs to do something in coding manually. but then again if you don't get one's hands dirty, even like... taking paper notes, then he will inevitably very quickly forget all that is tought. so we cannot 100% agree that teaching with cool AI artefacts is going to be sufficient. also im not sure which manual tasks should be forced upon otherwise (supposedly) smart peoples.
perhaps we'll have people late in life that will turn to coding things again by hand, for the sake of making their brain work, the way people turn to physical careers to stop the stress
>Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals?
I would have loved this in college. I know most don't, but I think we'll hit a point where the people who don't know enough to assess when model output is sub-par will fall by the wayside.
I'm not arrogant enough to think that I won't be included in this blast radius, so I try to dig as deeply as I can whenever possible (and where it makes sense,IE: I couldn't tell you all of the details of LLVM or hypervisor internals)
The issue is that AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well on any kind of device, for blind people or otherwise impaired, color blind, ...
However it's not that anyone cared before otherwise AI would know better than that
Well AI does whatever is told. or rather - expounds as per what the anchor (the prompt) started the generation. That is all - it doesn't do more. It has biases because of RLHF and other post-training, but not innate AI-bias. It's like... whatever you put in the archive will later on expound. But that's not the point realy.
The question is what is that we going to command the LLM do, how complete this requirement will be. But hold on - writing JS is not doing UX, and is not doing business analysis - definitely not the same thing.
JS is a general purpose language with fair amount of functional and declarative stuff in it, heavily influenced by Perl and LISP. So why would a person who's not inclined to dive in this matter (typically very hard stuff) would want to learn it, instead of spending a day out in the sun before the world ends? Well she did so (back in the day) mostly because there was a market demand for such skills.
And then we have autodidacts who don't need this type of education (not schooling!), and those that are not. The latter still want to take good salary and perhaps they can be trained into it. So, in essense, many people learned JS because there was a demand, and my prognosis is this demand for people writing JS goes down, not because the demand goes away, but because we won't be needing most of the JS code and perhaps also we won't be needimng UIs very soon (not in the same way we did before).
And, just imagine, if one's aware of first principles in programming, they can easily command the LLM/harness to create a perfectly working Swift code. Saying it because is exactly what myself did, even though this is remotely a language I am good at. Perhaps the amount of effort to get these libs right would've otherwise costed in the hundreds of thousands, now it costs 200$ a month for Fable/GPT6 and not-so-much-of-an-actual-understanding on my side, but a steady pace to keep the harness follow the road intended.
Why would then anyone want to learn JS, save for the fun of it?
Unless this is the endpoint of software engineering (React for the next thousand years?) someone’s gonna have to do the work of understanding and pushing things forward. It won’t be an agent.
Have there's been interesting developments since ai coding got popular?
> For better or worse, React is heavily overrepresented in the training weights, and “agent experience” is starting to matter more than developer experience.
Another winner takes all situation. This and the other post on agent tool use[1] makes me think we are in a period of great homogenization. I'm sure there's a group that's delighted about this but for me, it just makes me feel a little uneasy.
[1] https://armature.tech/blog/which-tools-coding-agents-install
What bothers me is that I notice it everywhere. Not only does AI have a distinct writing style, it has a distinct style of frontend UI/UX design. I notice it on more and more websites and it bores me. I want creativity and originality. I haven't really seen AI exhibit that at all. It can maybe be driven there through persistent human input but then I think it's still the human being original/creative.
You'll get used to everything looking the same, this always goes in cycles and we're bound for it correcting itself shortly. In the past, we had this for web 2.0, Bootstrap, Tailwind (right before LLMs) and now LLMs, it all starts to look the same, then people get tired of it and everything looks unique and novel, until people get bored of that and a new unified design language starts to spread again, leading everything to look the same...
It's all just cycles, seemingly forever, judging by the last ~20-30 years.
Creativity and originality? Like when you try to scroll a page and it rotates an image gallery instead?
Not sure if sarcastic but no. Check out for example this website: https://www.geofungames.com/
The functionality more or less works and the website is usable, but the design follows that "AI style". I'm not sure how else to describe it.
I think it's just the modern version of the default MySpace or Facebook page. People primarily need the functionality and they reach for the tool that gives them that functionality even if it feels fairly cookie cutter.
This is absolutely a generic AI website. Do you feel the same about one I've developed using AI? https://whistle-enterprise.com/
I think the AIslop of websites is down to the lack of vision or user journey and just going with the default which will always be generic and bland.
If it does feel in the "AI style" I'd love to understand what it is.
I wonder if this is overstated. Anecdotally, we use Vue at work and Claude and Codex handle it just fine. I'd expect Vue to be the third best-represented after React and Angular, but even then, we feel absolutely no need to change things up to get better results.
Vue's reactivity is quite similar to Solid's, AFAIK, so I wonder why there would be so many issues with Solid.
We have also started to have success getting LLMs to create custom lints for us to handle tricky edge cases. For example, discovering deep watches or tricky interactions - you can get a fair way asking an LLM to create a lint using a codemod library (in our case, vue-morph) that fires on this example but not on that example.
Vue had a good tenure as a solid #2 to React, so I think it probably has got a lot of representation in training data. Things really splitered after that but it got a good foothold.
The problem I see with vue is what vue patterns are you using. And the llms may be trained on more outdated ones more than current practices.
Agree. It wasn't as drastic but I think Vue did the 2=>3 update at an unfortunate time. They lost a lot of users along the way but they also confused a lot of the LLM training too, I am sure.
Still, I have great success with it, especially with Typescript.
Is anyone keeping track of these .. second order effects.. of the proliferation of agents? Like this, or oss projects getting 10s of 000s of bug report, or the Linux kernel site getting ddosed by crawlers..
See https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02209 but I hope researchers are looking to tackle this problem
Wasn't that true for tech in general though? I mean I have heard developers bitching about React for years now and every year I saw it get more adopted at the same time. Of course some obviously do not like it but the decision was usually driven by business and not coders. I feel its a simillar thing happening with AI code taste being primarily developed by big tech firms which ofc love homogenization. But its not all bad, I don't think people will just give up working on what they like because agent expeirenxe got better but who knows though
A lot of the bitching about react always had the same flavour of the complaints that JavaScript dares to have a NaN
To be fair it is stupid that NaN !== NaN but that is how IEEE and CPUs made floats to be
It's not stupid when you realise that NaN is not "not a number" but rather "not a particular number", this becomes clear from
being Inf rather than NaNhypot(Inf, NaN)I mean to me the whole point of NaN is that it should not equal NaN, so it seems sort of like you are making the complaint in the first sentence in your second sentence, only in a slightly more abstracted way. Unless you are of the opinion there is another better point to NaN?
funny story, I was once interviewing for a job where the tech guy did not know that NaN existed. I guess JavaScript wasn't his language, but not sure what was, and the code was in JavaScript for a Web Dev role.
> period of great homogenization
It's called alignment. And that's the correct word for it in my opinion.
The most important part is that we have to find a way to tackle the knowledge enshittification problem.
Because now that slopcode and slopposts are everywhere, the average quality level will decrease. We had the peak internet knowledge, and it's now gradually getting worse.
That's not a personal opinion, that's how attention matrixes and their keys/values computation works.
> It's called alignment
Alignment is such a polite term for "a giant boot that is crushing all of the uniqueness out"
Once it is done crushing, congrats! Everything is aligned.. by being flattened
Does the world need the "uniqueness" of 40 similar web frameworks?
the world certainly needs novel ideas. maybe eventually we'll come up with a web framework that doesn't suck - or rather we'll realise that Django had it right all along for all these years.
As long as there are standards, yes, why not. In Italian we have a saying: il mondo è bello perché è vario. The world is beautiful because it’s varied.
Perhaps not if the one framework we ended up with was a good one …
Perhaps not but the world does need the uniqueness of 40 different people who each made their own web frameworks
Since a good LLM can handle any of those 40 web frameworks, I think having 40 web frameworks is becoming less of a problem than it used to be. Actually, implementing ideas in an individual manner will become easier. Remember the Bazaar and the Cathedral? The Bazaar kind of failed on the client side, but LLMs may revive it.
It was once called 'natural monopoly'
My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people.
She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website.
I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's still experimental). She just provides the current website, tells how she wants it to look and it works great. I mean it's obviously ai generated but she gets quick results and is able to tweek things to look better by just telling deepseek what to do. 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.
This is a simple example. Basically it's one of those earlier jobs that you could get someone to bid on for $x but now you can do yourself for $20.
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 empowering for her.
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.
Wow, it’s fascinating after waking up to see all this conjecture here on why she didn’t pay for the subscription.
The short version, wasn’t for wanting to save money, but simply a matter of it not being worth the hassle to any of us to subscribe and then later cancel for such a small scope of work. If it was too frustrating I would have let her use my Claude sub.
Also, she’d been meaning to have it updated for years, a few extra days was nothing.
She did short sessions in spare time between other things, the wait between was maybe a little frustrating, but also gave the benefit that she would have had better clarity develop between sessions.
Website is not key to her business where it’s mostly word of mouth at this point (she’s been practicing for >20 years). Goals of website were:
- Findable in Google by “psychologist/therapist <area name>” (she also has a Google. Business profile so is findable on Google Maps).
- Minimal copy. A comforting sentence or two to state philosophy, qualifications, therapy types offered, where located, how to contact.
- Doesn’t feel dated.
Essentially it’s meant to complement the word of mouth aspect and maybe bring in the occasional completely new patient.
> 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.
See my more detailed sibling comment, but was more that the scope and urgency were so small that it wasn’t worth the hassle to set up the subscription and have to cancel it after.
I do get the sentiment for sure.
Personally though? I’ve made peace with the fact that I might have a 20/month subscription indefinitely. It’s slowly working its way towards being like a cell phone or Internet bill, although there’s reason to hope that the amount might decrease over time eventually.
There is an ocean sized gap for free stuff and something costing something, anything (not that this had to be the case).
Person not understanding this should not work in marketing, or even claim they understand human psychology.
Does updating the website bring in additional money?
Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?
> Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers.
It depends what "nicer" means. Paying a web designer/developer to create a bespoke website doesn't guarantee that said website will have a better UI/UX and, most importantly, "convert" at a higher rate. Not every web designer/developer understands IA, content, performance optimization, etc.
The popular AI tools produce websites that are clearly AI-produced if you know the patterns, but that doesn't mean they can't be usable and quite effective at converting. And if you have a bit of skill with prompting, AI can be really good at working through performance bottlenecks, etc.
She had no shortage of patients from word of mouth, but old website was minor liability in its datedness potentially putting off prospective patients.
People already knew about her and website is essentially just “this is what I do, where I am and how you can contact me”.
> but old website was minor liability in its datedness potentially putting off prospective patients.
Anecdata: I’d be more likely to use the services of a company with a good, old-style site than a bad, new style site. Things like pop-overs, text that animates in as you scroll, banner images that take up most of the “abive the fold” are all red flags for me.
Oh, and the most common one: “Read more”.
A modern site that avoids all those can be great. But those are rare, IMO.
The new web page (since it's a single page website now) is also mobile friendly and intentionally not "flashy".
Another goal with the website I didn't note before is that its "quality" or "style" should generally not be consciously noticed, it shouldn't stand out for any bad reasons, people see it, get a good impression, do what they were looking to do with ease, success.
I got this philosophy from my interior designer (not to be confused with decorator) brother who told me how when he's done a good job, no one notices, but when he's done a bad job then people either almost instantly notice or simply feel uncomfortable without necessarily being able to exactly identify why, e.g. first impression of your hotel room should instantly be "feels nice" (and same with a public space in a building) and then you remain feeling comfortable throughout because the space is actually big enough for its purpose and laid out practically.
Changing office address? New qualifications? Better copy?
so. if website does not lead to customers - why do any of that? actually why have website? Once you say yes to website you imply having one is somehow valuable, so in that case why not spend 20 dollars.
After 20 years, her new business is mostly word of mouth, but website was very dated and potentially a minor liability.
Scope of work and urgency were so minimal that it was simply not worth the hassle to actually subscribe and then have to unsubscribe later.
If there was no free option we could have done it on my Claude sub or she would have just paid.
Arguably, if the website does not have a positive value and only negative, the logical thing is to shut it down and keep the Google Business profile imo. I assume she has been paying for the domain name all this years too or is it a subdomain?
I think the new version is a net positive value as creates a better "vibe" to prospective patients than just a Google Business listing would, and I expect will age well.
The domain's used for email anyway and is on a very cheap local hosting plan, probably all-in-all like ZAR 84 per month and ZAR 200 per year for the domain, so ZAR ~1200 (USD ~75) per year.
Old website was built in a different era, Google Business didn't exist, "HTML5" wouldn't be a thing for another 5 years, web design styles were completely different and was before iPhone meaning that modern day "mobile friendly" was not even a thought.
When my father started running guest suites over 10 years-ago I made a single page website with essentially the same goals but using a Hugo template. The website still feels "modern" today, so I expect this new one of my mother's will age well too.
Just because websites can exist. Sometimes things are done for fun, or just for the sake of it.
This perspective declares all the personal websites of people worthless, however, they are priceless.
Because people's curiosity and creativity is priceless as well.
Similarly, why create art and share it around if it doesn't bring in customers? Why make music, take photos, dance? Do we live to serve customers, or do customers' existence serve us to live a better life?
Questions, questions...
Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $).
If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-bono psychology practice then you can translate the dollar signs to units of happiness or whatever (which I would imagine is her real goal regardless).
This person is spending her time to create the website (with ChatGPT's help). How much is that time worth? Of course when it's your business hourly pay is tricky, but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much of it.
You're pretty much right about the reasons.
But as for the "value of her time", despite having to wait due to the rate limits for free users, this was probably still less time consuming for her than paying someone else to make the website.
She basically just did maybe half a dozen (probably less) sessions of less than 15 minutes each. This was a very a low-priority thing for her and did it between other things and after hours, so it didn't really use up time she was likely to use productively anyway.
If she had dealt with a web designer, she would probably have used up more of her time with several back-and-forth interactions with them, which also probably would have had to be done during business hours. Chances are that ChatGPT was better at intuiting what she wanted in a case like this and gave her quicker feedback loops despite the waiting for more "free tokens".
Would $20 have been worth spending on this? Absolutely. But the scope and priority were so minimal that the hassle of doing the once-off sub was more for her than just doing little bits between other stuff. If it wasn't available for free we would have used my Claude sub or she would have just paid.
I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space.
If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well.
Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online presence. Instead, their abilities and expertise moved them to the top in their respective fields, and the whole community knows how and when to reach them.
So, maybe a shiny website is not a hard-requirement for a good psychology practice, IDK.
So, the thing is, maybe this was her way to explore new things and decompress while doing some mundane thing from her perspective for free. Sometimes it's not that $20 which you can pay without any negative side-effects, but the desire to see how far the thing goes without the token, or just because you don't feel any urgency to do the task, so that $20 looks like an unnecessary waste.
I have been in both places.
Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years!
If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost.
Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising.
Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads...
From what I have seen, people's perspective on value lies on a very wide spectrum. My mom won't buy a YouTube premium subscription, because she said she likes the ads. It's a kind of discovery platform for her. It's not that I share the same perspective, but I respect her about that.
I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.).
For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it.
These things are very subtle and are sometimes about ethos, and not about value at all. For instance:
* You propose I buy your ¤4 overhyped toothbrush. If I spend 10 minutes digging around, I could find a sub-¤1 toothbrush. Effectively I'm doing 10 minutes of work at less than minimum wage in order to avoid owning the premium toothbrush. Do I do this? I might! The reason is that I want no part in your hype.
* You offer me a loyalty scheme that will genuinely save me money if I participate. I only have to pay attention to your offers and routinely identify myself and I might get 10% savings, all the time. I decline this because you don't get to use my brain cycles for your profit, even if I profit too.
* You offer me a free thing that happens to track me and funnels data to data brokers. I decline it even though it does me no actual harm at all, because I don't want you to make money from personal facts about me, even when the facts are robotically aggregated and anonymised. Ethics are at stake: ethically speaking, you can just piss off. That is worth more than a free gadget, and it's not even an equation.
>If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point?
the problem here really, from both sides of the argument, is the assumption that humans are rational economic actors.
One side assumes that it is not worth 20 dollars to update the site quickly thus she does not do it, but really for that to be true (given costs of psychologists sessions etc.) then it would not even be worth updating the site, or paying for the site hosting or the domain at all.
The other side assumes that given that she is updating the site it must be worth paying 20 dollars to do so quickly and asks why she does not, given that it is worth updating the site.
If humans are rational economic actors she should be updating her professional site because it has some professional benefit to her that she is aware of, but this creates the two problems stated above.
This problem, and the examples you give, are resolved by understanding that humans are not really rational economic actors and the reason that she is updating the site and not paying the extra 20 dollars at the same time cannot be resolved to a non-contradictory answer.
We are at best, partially rational economic actors. Rational-like.
I've responded to your other comment too, but regarding anyone's assumption that it's worth paying $20 to have it done quickly, but there was no urgency as it's been a thing she's been wanting to do for years.
She probably put it off because the need to actually contact other people to kick off the process was way more of an impediment than anything, whereas on a Sunday afternoon when I was visiting, we kicked off the process on a whim.
She was able to "work with" ChatGPT during after-hours and in <15-minute sessions, between her doing other things, so it's not like she was likely to have used the time productively anyway.
There's a quote I love:
> The idea was nice, but it involved humans.
> but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much
Did you notice that this is completely unrelated to the idea that the $20 would turn a profit for the business?
It's just the argument "$20 isn't very much money, so why not spend it?".
In this case, because spending it was more hassle than any time she would have saved by doing so. If she had no choice, then spending it would not have been an issue.
If anything, it was a bit of a chore while keeping in mind that chores aren't necessarily a bad thing, e.g. tidying your kitchen after a meal is a chore, but it's satisfying to complete the chore as the alternative is not only a messy looking kitchen, but the hygiene issues which come with it. It's just something which needed to be done.
The once off nature, scope and priority were so minor that it wasn't worth the hassle of actually paying, but if free wasn't an option we would have either used my Claude sub or she would have just paid, no big deal.
Speaking for myself, I would not touch any professional practice sporting a slopcoded website with a ten-foot pole.
> Otherwise why update the website at all?
Because you have it.
Only minimally, after 20 years of practicing word of mouth does 99% of the work.
There is an entire industry built around this premise, yes.
Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks.
From what I've seen around it will be a WordPress website still, running some at-best-once-updated version of Divi/Elementor/WpBakery, built using their equally terrible new AI tools.
Maybe, but what about when "Claude do this" picks WordPress for someone that doesn't know what a reverse shell is?
Still a win. Claude loves to write code from scratch instead of searching the web and pulling in dependencies, so you’ll likely end up with fewer garbage tier plugins written by people whose average skill level is put to shame by bootcamp grads; those people don’t know what a reverse shell is either.
So… similar levels of garbage code, but with no eyes looking at it.
Every static HTML pages built this way with ai is another WordPress site that wont get built by contractors just to be neglected, compromised, and used to launch phishing and ransomware attacks.
You mean the very web sites that the "AI" trained on?
If you think AI can't make buggy code, there are several dozen thousand comments on HN that disagree.
Ai cant make a static HTML page sitting on something like cloudflare pages have an rce bug.
She wouldn’t be able to do any of that without you setting it up first. She would not know anything about deepseek, meaning of a folder with index.html file. Would not know even what to ask ChatGPT, “I need a website”? You make it sound like easy task anyone can do, when you provided 99% of otherwise impossible for them to easily obtain key knowledge needed.
Any idiot can spend one minute now to acquire this amazing knowledge that you can just ask ChatGPT “I need a website”. If they don’t know now, sooner or later they’ll know from a short TikTok or something in the next couple of months/years. Not to mention AI companies are spending $$$ on ads to raise awareness; professionals already know they can create slides with LLMs, literally nothing’s different when it comes to most content websites. Yes, it’s an easy task any idiot can do. Head in sand, pretending it’s some sort of $10k for knowing where to hit situation isn’t going to reverse the trend.
You're not accounting for how deeply unpopular AI is with the general public. Would anyone be making those TikTok videos in the first place? Would OP's wife want to use AI if he wasn't there to advocate it?
Given that my nontechnical coworker has shared quite a few of these TikToks/Google Shorts with me, yes tons of people are making them. I don’t know what kind of alternative reality you live in, you can just go to any social media site and search for “create website with ChatGPT” etc. and check the view counts.
Plus the context here isn’t any random person, but people who intend to pay for website development for their businesses.
Given that my normie wife, normie family and normie coworkers haven't shared any such videos with me, my own anecdata seems to cancel yours out and now we're at an impasse. Perhaps you're living in an alternative reality where your nontechnical coworkers get recommended weird AI videos because of where they work and who they associate with?
Sure, because people you know haven’t shared with you, no one would “be making those TikTok videos in the first place”. Can’t argue with logic.
AI is not deeply unpopular, that’s just nonsense. The complaint ratio is just relatively high from a loud minority. Don't believe me? Just check Pew.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
It’s true that about half of all adults overall never use chatbots, but it’s not out of a negative perception, it’s largely just lack of interest with a side of privacy concerns and inaccuracy concerns. While people do tend to think AI will eventually be a net negative in society, this isn’t like an overwhelming feeling and opinions on the impact to themselves personally is less strong, not more.
You are conflating "uses chatbots" with "likes AI," and seemingly ignoring your own link's findings that young Americans are especially negative towards it.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-does-everyone-hate-data-cen...
you can literally do that to chatgpt
Haha, yes. Can have it code a webserver from scratch on a disposable vape. Should be quite theraputic.
The key is you're doing it yourself, so it takes your time away from something else. And if something doesn't quite work out, who's the backup?
For small shops and startups, this probably doesn't matter. For mission critical sites, who's more dependable? AI is a tool, that's all it is.
> 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.
will not not necessarily be true for AI generated works in all territories
If nobody owns the work, then nobody can stop you from changing it, either.
if nobody owns the work, then anyone can take it from you.
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.
It's generally a little more complicated than that. Not up to writing paragraphs about it so I'll just leave this as a note so anybody that's interested can do their own research.
show us these "corporate websites"
That was just part of her work. She was employee #11 at a now $4.5B biotech company so everyone that early on had to do everything. She worked for Novartis, for booz allen, and others. She usually hired McKinsey consultants for projects but the web stuff was for smaller companies. She managed a team in India for one of her companies that took care of the web stuff. Basically just look at any top-10 Pharma or government website and you might see what she managed.
I choose to imagine that you guys are like a cute "opposites attract" Marxist x capitalist power-couple :)
i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades.
like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough.
the fact that your wife can be productive at lower cost means that more products will be built and more opportunities will be made. instead of spending money on website design, her business can spend money developing biotech.
i welcome that, even if it means that things will change from the past and those that have made a career out of charging thousands will get replaced by a $20/month subscription.
Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI
FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that.
Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result.
But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots of unreliable and unoptimized code that will go live if you don't know what they're doing under the hood and can potentially cause issues in the future. Remember that all this tools do are sorts of interpolation. I've seen lately lots of "modern" websites with tons layers of !important in their CSS and who knows the monstrosities that they have with their JS.
Meanwhile I and all people like me still don't have a job because all of this and the alleged "thousands" I was getting for doing this things.
the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that.
the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic job at that. that is what the OP was talking about in his article.
you don't have a job because you're not adapting to this new world order quickly enough. i predict that there will be insane demand for porting existing applications off these over priced SASS contracts and building tailored products for businesses. as much as they are trying to convince people, you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model and can envision a better solution to the actual problem out of thin air.
i'm burning 500m+ tokens a day on a $200/mo subscription. it is creating 10000x more value for me. it is no longer how much you know HTML/CSS, it is how well you know how to get AI to do what you want it to do and the only way to develop that skill, is to do it.
> you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model
I'm sure many people will think that; and I'm also fairly confident that 5 years later they'll take their obscure, bug-ridden, vibecoded monstrosity that nobody really understands, throw it out, and get a salesforce contract. Technical debt doesn't disappear just because you have agents working for you; in fact, it is exploding right now, and I would bet good money that 2-3 years for now there will be a flourishing cottage industry of consultancies specialized in dealing with such monstrosities.
Context is important in a response like this. Giacomo is a Sr. Presales consultant at a SaaS company that sells "The AI operating system for modern Finance." Of course you're adverse to things because it is a direct threat to what your business offers today.
If I can vibe code up a solution that fixes my problems for $200, it doesn't matter what happens in 5 years. The rate of change that's happening today in the increase in quality of the output of the models, I can just tell it to fix whatever we have and make it better.
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 each and every number and how it modifies it, and then you will have to maintain it because standards and laws change every other day. Sure, get an agent to cook you up a full consolidation solution, see how quickly you get laughed out of the room by grown-ups.
Btw, I am not "adversed to things" - the stuff we do has agents built-in, that do all sorts of wonderful things. The difference is that we can demonstrate that they do them right, with financial intelligence standardized and battle-tested across thousands of customers all over the world. Our customers don't have to worry about rewriting their pile of vibed hacks, or about being humiliated by auditors, because we take care of all that stuff for them. That's worth more than the pennies you save by having cousin' Vinnie vibe up a multidimensional financial engine that takes 3 days to calculate trillions of useless intersections before falling over.
Ha! you think anyone cares about regulatory compliance? no, they only need the appearance of regulatory compliance
Everyone has a plan until they get sued into oblivion.
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.
> 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.
i've written smtp servers.
it has the best spam control on the planet.
i'd never use anything else.
That's great to know, Jon. I suspect non-US governments have a different opinion. Heck, even the US government likely has a different opinion. Not to mention Google competitors in any other sector.
one out of 10000000 customers.
Have you any idea of how many businesses need a financial consolidation tool, out of the total number of businesses out there?
No, of course you don't, you write email servers.
Sure, your local garage will now do their accounting in vibed apps instead of vibed Excel files. I suspect multinationals will choose not to.
I can see I'm under your skin as you're trying to make this personal. I have a long history of being early and correct with many things. What is transforming under your nose, faster than anything ever before, will take you for surprise, unless make a conscious decsion to wake up. Do yourself a favor and listen to what he's saying... https://youtu.be/NYFGCESmikA?t=2883
I was not the one who brought personal qualifications into a public argument, Jon. I guess you don't like it when your lack of specialized knowledge becomes evident.
As I said, I already know what AI is doing - I already use it just fine, I even help building and selling it. The impact it is having is obvious. But like recipe books did not turn everyone into Michelin chefs, it won't turn hacks into rigorous builders of trusted systems.
So you think AI will only ever be a recipe book? That's the disconnect we have in opinion.
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.
it is funny having some anon tell me something that is 100% different from my own experience and i've been coding for 30+ years now.
“the thing you haven't come to terms with…”
Why the fuck do so many people write like this nowadays? Quit acting like you have access to some sort of universal knowledge or unique insight into other people’s state of mind; it’s extremely obnoxious. You’re presumably trying to communicate with adult professionals, not children.
If you're "reluctantly using" HN, maybe you should stop because it doesn't seem healthy for you.
Yes, I do have some unique insights based on decades of experience building products and businesses. People who think that AI is going to produce shit vibe code forever, deserve the decency to be warned about what is coming.
no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing.
i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written.
from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid of quickbooks because yesterday it was down and i couldn't log into it. figure out what i'm using there and present me an interface that allows me to do whatever i'm doing in quickbooks, but with my existing data from stripe, deel and mercury."
it then dutifully went off and built me that app and now i'm running it in parallel and synchronized with quickbooks, until i feel that i can just turn that off. it is customized exactly to my business workflow and easily maintained with full unit tests. it costs me nothing but a $200/mo codex subscription and a few hours of work.
I was originally a Flash developer, when that died when Steve Jobs banned it from iPhones, I pivoted to frontend. I got to see web evolve over the next decade or so and loved every part of it.
Now, still as a frontend engineer albeit much more senior. The writing is on the wall, again. It's time to reskill for AI.
It's not bad news.
We as experienced engineers are needed to help build in the guardrails, frameworks, the new tooling, etc. There is a lot of work that is needed that requires actual engineers with technical experience.
Like the early internet, I see this as a new beginning and we get to decide how it evolves.
I think that is the nature of being a software engineer, even before AI you had to keep learning new libraries/SDKs/APIs/languages to keep up with the industry trend. I think it will remain the same in the age of AI, good engineers will adapt.
IMO the reskilling is not that hard. Leetcode and applying for jobs has been way harder. In fact, the AI reskilling has been a boon for me. Suddenly I'm able to get a job way more easily and get to call myself a senior, all of a sudden. And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time [1].
So yea, I really welcome the change.
[1]
What I mean with being a generalist:
Did iOS dev as a student, web dev bootcamp instructor, teaching assistant (programming), teaching fellow (programming), found some SQL injections + docker vulnerabilities + replicated rowhammer with WebGL, did a lot of full-stack engineering (5 years), did a UX bootcamp, studied 2 bachelors + 1 masters + research master which is 2 years (psych, business, CS and game-design). Each full-stack engineering job was in a different language (C#, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Pharo/Smalltalk, currently JS & Python).
From one of the links in the article (https://exploringjs.com/):
> The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026).
Oof that hits hard. I'm not an author or anything like that, but wow.
> So where does this leave frontend dev education?
I think this is more generally,
> So where does this leave education?
We need to figure this out anyway, because gpt galaxia and gpt cosmos will mean no skill is worth learning functionally.
The law of 42: Any debate regarding artificial intelligence and human skill will inevitably collapse into a discussion on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
Hard disagree.
The AI is a fantastic assistive tool, and in many ways it surpass my skillset as a software developer(I'm a skilled software developer, although it's not my job).
However, I do not believe I would be able to build what I'm building using LLMs, without myself having the right skills.
you forgot a 'yet' somewhere in the last sentence of your comment.
No, I didn't forget anything. Don't put words in my mouth.
I do not believe random Joe, even an intelligent one, will be able to build advanced software using LLMs in the near future.
Currently (re)learning my math fundamentals and it is indeed frustrating to see that Fable 5 has everything correct. It reads my scribbles and then tells me whether my answer is right or wrong.
I can't wait for the asteroid to hit C-Suite and senior execs. These are the most meaningless jobs and easiest to automate, with the most cost savings.
beware! using AI for middle management is how you speedrun to dystopia. Bad Managers can be fired, good managers can manage up. on other hand, "bad" AI will remain and continue to be dystopic, and "good" AI will be killed by higher management for being not being a doormat.
The csuite has the power to keep AI away from it or make itself mandatory.
You would prefer the company that employs you be run by AI rather than humans?
I suppose that depends on how dystopian you think current middle management is. I've had managers that were deliberately malicious, AI would almost certainly have been better in that situation.
> Meanwhile, Cursor and Viget have blogged about migrating their codebases from Solid and Lit, respectively, to React.
That was maddening to read. Here I was thinking we should all be migrating to better performing frontend solutions. Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX?
At least last year most agents wrote materially worse code in htmx.
> Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX?
Definitely not. That's skill issues. The shadow DOM can be a bit tricky.
I think people overestimate the effect of representation of specific programming languages or frameworks.
I had Codex or Claude create simple web apps for me in Objective-Smalltalk. And it did a good job.
I am pretty sure that Objective-Smalltalk web apps are so underrepresented in the training set as to be almost or even actually nonexistent.
These articles make me wonder, are we driving ourselves into a local maximum of progress? If people move to React because agents know React, will the next better framework ever get traction?
Extrapolate this thought to more than just front end dev, especially because we'll have fewer actual practitioners to invent the next framework.
Maybe the agents will do it for us I guess?
The big bet is that the LLMs will get good enough to invent new frameworks or even branches of math. I hope it pans out. Otherwise we will get stuck in a local maximum for a while.
On the positive side We won’t get the cars, but our horses will be damn fast ;)
Or another angle - will we even need a framework? Frameworks exist to give humans better a better interface for common patterns. But LLMs can find and replicate patterns all day in vanilla Javascript without getting bored or annoyed by bad ergonomics.
I have been having huge success with CC and HTMX+Go. Not even tailwind. It made me never want to touch React again; it eased my way into the simpler stuff.
a lot of educators in the frontend space are very good and had excellent material e.g Dr Alex.
before 'A.I' - frontend was a tarpit - very few people did it well specially with SPA frameworks. There was always something broken whether due to state mismatch or something else. the state management libraries didn't help either with most of them being so complex. HTMX etc were a reaction to that complexity. Then add performance stuff - very few people had the skills to solve for that too.
now with 'A.I' - most of the educational material has either been taken offline due to 'A.I' scrappers, the llm's tend to hallucinate - so how are we gonna nurture talent to become experts. One thing I give to llms though - is that they're very good at plain javascript, decent at the frontend frameworks. But complexity around frontend work still remains - with 'A.I' generated code & devs who don't understand how to fix stuff - just a disaster waiting to happen.
The fear I have is that everything will become the same... boring. AI will suck the soul out of everything it touches.
As if trying to make CSS behave or fixing the breakage introduced by React N+1 was the definition of fun...
> The frontend is less risky to just hand to an agent.
The smaller the problem, the less risky it is to do this, regardless of the nature of the problem. This is not a frontend-specific issue today.
Frontend development - perhaps more than any other kind of software development - is “what you see is what you get”. There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken.
Systems engineering isn’t like that. Vibe coders beware: A database could silently corrupt data, or have latent security vulnerabilities. It might have a badly designed query language that will be difficult to change later. But frontend code can be rewritten at will. It’s a perfect target for LLMs.
At the same time I have found LLMs far less competent at frontend because they don't seem to have any visual understanding of what a good website looks like.
Similarly for how things feel, like animations, physics, controls, etc. That's one reason I don't think agents will be creating games anyone wants to play, any time soon (unless they just straight up copy an existing good game)
> There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken
Any website that has any UI state management or does any kind of network calls can be invisibly broken in many, many ways
> Systems engineering isn’t like that.
Whatever lets you sleep at night man. If you really think you’re better than the machine at spotting arcane Unix incompatibilities, or that you’re somehow more “safe” than frontend jockeys, I’ve got really bad news for you.
The UX is what makes the users use the apps, systems, games, their phones.
"There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken."
??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states.
I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."
React state bugs are usually not invisible failure modes.
Other kinds of software - for example, the backend of a website - have far more invisible failure modes. Security. Correctness. Performance. Bad API design leading to overfetching. Etc. Software works great on your machine and when you demo it, but it falls apart at scale. Endpoints that aren't secured properly. Race conditions cause silent data corruption. Memory leaks. And so on.
If claude messes up writing a react frontend, we're more likely to find the problem quickly. And frontend bugs usually don't continue to cause problems after they've been fixed. Silent bugs in the backend are more dangerous and more expensive.
No need to engage with bad faith premises. You cant convince someone who is invested in their own FUD.
When done properly, yes. But AI agents are doing a lot of data logic in the frontend that should be in the backend behind secure api's. When this happens, the frontend becomes a massive risk.
The front end is not less risky to hand to the agent. There are a thousand different ways the agent could bork the UI and say it's good. And knowing how to babysit the AI/Agents doing the UI is more important than ever. Yeah I agree that developer education in the front end space seems to be diminishing, but let's not pretend like non of that matters anymore.
Yeah, I think what gets lost in the corporate AI convo is that it accelerates impact; for better and worse.
This is what I mourn the most too. The collaborative teaching and mentoring relationships. Not just for front end. Covid and now AI has just obliterated the software meetup and teaching space.
There is going to come one day that companies (and any website owner) will wish they didn't use AI and instead used a simple (maybe even plain-text) website. That will come when people really need information from that website but can't get to it.
https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performan...
Discussion regarding that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734
Heck, you can have your information as clear and concise as possible, but the moment I sense that "AI-generated" texture, I am immediately closing the tab. This is just extrapolating from how I feel about the bevy of obviously AI-Generated flyers and banners that have been gaining a lot of traction in real life.
I've seen some websites now just serve separate md endpoint (for agents to read)
I even ended reading those instead of main "interactive" websites myself
As agents are not great at navigating react either, this will catch on and you will have what you want
Doubtful. This is just the cost of doing business. 99.9999% uptime for a fraction of the cost is totally fine for all businesses. Government should be the exception though.
I wish that was the answer to all of these people setting their spouse, their grandmother, their boss loose with LLMs to build sites. It should just be acceptable to have a simple site that conveys information well, and then we wouldn't need to boil the seas to generate pages of shiny slop.
Absolutely this. Although I like the shiny and polished looks, getting the info out is the most important, and it is hard yo beat pure black-on-white text
Already knew before AI, frontend is easy, only difficulty memorizing trivia.
Prompt: Answer without searching the internet:
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
> If you write a React component with an agent, though, then the risk of just yolo’ing it into production is (typically) much lower.
If your state management gets out of sync with the form controls your users are working with it can become pretty high risk because now users see one thing and something else actually gets sent to the backend.
If your coding agent screwed up so bad that wrong data is being shown to the user, in August 2026, thats more on the prompter than anything else.
But the prompter is supposed to be someone who doesn’t know web dev. That’s their selling point.
Hasn't poor training always been the status quo? It's not just the front end, and its not just JavaScript. It's the web application space in a more general sense, because I am also looking at all those Java developers maintaining legacy web applications.
In fact this reminds me of my last face to face interview. The employer wants to stand up a new enterprise SAAS solution from scratch in TypeScript to rid themselves of a costly venture. The idea is absolutely solid and the financials make complete sense on both ends. But... Supposedly there is an urgent need to fill that position and yet months later the position is still there and vacant.
The problem is that there are exceptionally few people who can write original applications from the ground up in JavaScript/TypeScript in the world of corporate employment. Yes, yes, there are trillion fantastic open source applications written in these technologies, but businesses just can't do it. Secondly, the compounding factor, is that they don't know how to interview for it because almost nobody in the corporate employment space knows what it looks like to write an original application.
That is not a technology problem. Its an institutional and culture failure and it isn't new. In the web space if you want to be a real programmer you do it for free on your own time because your employed time is prioritized with putting text on screen like a beginner.
Maybe I'm an outlier here but I moved into front end to steer products and the resultant architecture into making sense from the incomplete or contradictory "requirements" we got from product and even UX. I've been doing this for over 20 years and every company has needed good engineers to make the product a logical reality.
LLMs piping out UIs from PM prompts aren't solving that imho.
I'm a backend engineer working closely with a single frontend guy on an internal app and after creating a pr in his repo, it was immediately clear that AI can build some nice brochure sites, but UI state management, clean UX, good performance and API dispatch handling still require you to know what your doing for things to work well.
I think that frontend devs merely have to move from debating their frameworks to focusing more on user problems, maintainability, performance etc. but that is every dev right now...
I spent 2 years developing and polishing a front end web application, and then some other engineers at my company pointed Claude at it to try to reproduce it. The slop it crapped out would make most if not all our users leave for the competition. Then they had the nerve to ask me to explain what was bad about the sloppified version. I'm looking for a new job.
Looking forward to that entry level laptop with 128GB RAM
I worked for web SaaS companies for a long time because money. I saw this coming when React came along. No one knows or cares about the whole stack. Training adapts to the market. Knowledge is lost.
I got out before this. My new role since 2020 doesn’t go near the front end. I don’t know anything about React. I don’t know what the state of the art is on the front end. I have actually come to despise the “new” web. Alas so have our customers in recent years because the user interfaces are generally a lot less suited to LOB applications. Everything is too large, too generic, no visual cues, nothing works with the keyboard. Now everyone is building swathes of this stuff because LLMs can crank out new user interface fast. Our endpoints have multiplied, ROI has declined.
I had a customer the other day say they wish we still distributed our Visual Basic application as it was much simpler and easier to use. That was a real eye opener for me.
This is the asteroid we need to keep an eye on.
You can pivot to design systems. I believe they’re 80% development problem and just 20% design problem really.
"Note I’m not saying there are zero risks: the agent could mess up accessibility, it could cause an infinite loop that blocks users, etc. But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse)."
This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just for the record, I'm a backend dev. So I don't have much stake in this game.
This idea is, of course, not uncommon. "If the backend has to treat the frontend as adversarial anyway, and has all this cool stuff (constraints etc) for guaranteeing consistency of the system, then the frontend can just do whatever, right?" It plays into a lot of biases around typical frontend devs, typical backend devs, language stereotypes, etc. So it _sounds_ good.
Let me tell you for a moment about one of the spookiest bugs I've seen. It was an app for sorting personal photos. You'd upload pics/vids off your phone, they appear in the UI, you click a folder for them to go into (or click delete to discard), etc. Simple app, right?
Well, naturally, pics from even vaguely modern phones are regularly 5MB or more. Not really something you want to sling around while a user is browsing and their main activity is going to be looking at said pic to decide what folder it goes in (or if it gets deleted). So we thumbnail. And the main app only ever shows the user the thumbnails. The backend organized things quite simply: it gets a list of images from the frontend, it assigns each of them a zero-based index, and generates a thumbnail you'll also access via index. Imagine a URL scheme like `images/0` and `images/0/thumbnail` serving the real assets and the thumbnail.
Well, this app had a bug at one point. The backend was indexing by the arbitrary order the user uploaded them in. The frontend was mostly doing this too. Unfortunately the logic for thumbnails was incorrectly indexing by the "taken time" (which was a post-upload timestamp constructed by looking at basically every available timestamp and picking the "best" one. i.e. hopefully the one the iOS camera app adds, but obviously pics come from other places too and you never know what a user will upload). The end result being users would upload pics, see a thumbnail of an accidental pic they took of their shoe, hit delete. But actually they were deleting a pic of their baby or similar.
Literally none of the testing caught this for 2 main reasons: headless tests don't look at images, and you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image") (at least not easily... i guess image models could do it now? but probabilistic? not a word i like in my unit tests? I digress, this predated the current crop of "AI").
Now let me generalize: your frontend isn't just a weird way to call RPCs on your backend. It's part of the application. I don't think you can just hand-wave. And as we saw above, you can't even say "well the frontend is stateless! any bug is 1 deploy away from fixing!" - deploying the frontend didn't get anyone their baby pictures back.
> you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image"
You can though. Maybe not exactly what you are thinking but there are some pretty good image similarity algorithms like dhash out there that do stuff like this. Mostly they get used to check for duplicate uploads, copyright materials, or "does this look like porn" style filters
This isn't something that needs image models to accomplish really.
The actual problem is that no-one had considered that this (desync between front and backend) COULD happen. Once it was realized that it was possible (and worth testing) the bug was practically solved already.
Such is true for many bugs. Even if you have unit tests, they only test on things you've thought of. It's usually the stuff you haven't thought of that gets you.
No reason not to unit test of course, but don't get a false sense of complacency or assume testing is easy either. That's why it's great to do things very carefully (and probably not with AI Agents).
>But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code.
Tell that to Digg.
If you slop oit a front-end, your users will leave. It's that simple. The front-end is the part the users use the most, nobody cares how "elegant" your APIs are, or what kind of database the system uses. The front-end matters to users, a lot.
I've seen AI take a perfectly good front-end and slop out a piece of crap that will make the users leave in droves. And when nobody raises their hand (or in my case, everyone else is in the grip of AI psychosis) then bad times are ahead.
Yep. I don't know why this is so hard for teams to understand: if the part your customers pay you to interact with (the UI/UX) doesn't fucking work, your customers are going to leave.
We need to kill this two-party-system-brain crap and siloing front end and back end. Learn both. It isn't difficult. It allows you to design much better systems that avoid complexity and unreliability.
I honestly think specializing in front or back end is a good thing. Sure, it does help to know both, but there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. I'm full-stack leaning towards front-end, and working on a personal project I know where the back-end is lacking. The front-end is pretty great but not as great as it could be if I could focus all my skill only on front-end.
Yeah, exactly this.
The Web has always been a bunch of things: complicated backends that just need something in the frontend to operate, flashy marketing sites that don't do much behind the scenes but build brand credibility, cheap-to-free sites that people cobble together just to get something out there. Some are "web sites", some are "web apps".
For some of these cases, frontend is probably dead. For some, either the robots aren't quite able to have the level of originality and fidelity people are after yet, or the robots will enable more people to do better frontend work.
And like you're saying, it has to "feel" good/right. That can be a hard thing to prompt!
That only works if viable alternatives exist, the moats aren’t too large and users have the freedom to switch. For example, Reddit was a viable alternative to Digg at the time, Facebook was a viable alternative to MySpace. Enterprise software has some truly grotesque UI but the user doesn’t have the freedom to switch and the moats are enormous.
As someone who loves FE the slop people are pushing where I work is really quite upsetting to me.
I reviewed some code earlier which clearly wasn't intended for consumed by humans and I know with certainty this dev wouldn't have understood 90% of what that code did. It looked like hours of Claude trying to force square into a round hole tbh, but it worked.
Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. If Claude can maintain it then who cares... Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world.
I wish it did matter of course, but like most of coding these days, it just doesn't.
> Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world.
Last week alone I was unable to access two major websites because their auth flow was broken (I was attempting to log in with Apple, so not "the happy path"). I was just locked out, had to contact support. I guess this mentality is what causes it.
We had safeguards and best practices built over the years of learnings to avoid introducing these kind of regressions. And we threw them away in half a year to...gain some productivity in delivering features that most likely the users don't even want.
> Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore.
You absolutely should've rejected it. Putting slop into production is a huge trap, because now the humans can't understand it and the LLM is just going to make it worse and worse over time.
I think what OP is saying is that the fact that a human can't understand it won't matter as the code will only ever be read by AI.
Yes exactly. I think we all understood at a high-level what it was doing.
The issue I had was that it was doing a lot of weirdness like using `Object.defineProperty` to try to force an existing library to do something it wasn't suppose to do. No human would have written that code.
Although I generate most of my code with AI I still personally try to keep it understandable by a competent developer. Where as most people on my team are not good at FE so they just trust the LLM to get it right. But ultimately it just doesn't matter anymore.
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 parts you actually typed. 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. Do not mix them up.
> (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.
Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer
Being a programmer has always meant dealing with abstraction layers and climbing up the abstraction ladder.
You are simply learning a new language, whose syntax happens to look like English (or whatever language you speak), but with new, undiscovered, and constantly changing design patterns and best practices.
the thing that allowed me to effectively climb higher in the abstraction stack, is to dive lower first.
Don't forget probabilistic.
It depends how much you outsource to the llm.
If you outsource everything to a llm, I just don’t think you get very good results right now. Language models aren’t great at remembering all the little design decisions that are needed in medium to large projects. The code ends up riddled with semi-conflicting design choices, which have been slammed together and maintained by context inertia. For a lot of projects this is more than fine - sometimes higher quality work simply isn’t worth my time. But for a lot of projects, you will pay for that slop later.
But I think there is a useful middle ground. If you carefully review all the decisions an llm makes, I think you can often be more productive than just programming everything by hand. But it’s a very different way to do engineering. I think I learn more this way than if I program by hand - if only because I’m touching more code. My mind roves around the design space a lot more. I don’t lock in as much as when I’m programming each piece individually.
If you work with an llm like this, your engineering skill matters more than ever.
That is why I am very thankful for my job. We are not really allowed to use LLMs for much of anything.
That sounds like an absolute dream.
Typing the code was never the interesting part.
>> Typing the code was never the interesting part.
Code is fascinating! An abstract language to compile to program a CPU. So many ways to do this!
Now we're using natural language, which at times is extremely verbose. "[{}]" versus "array of objects", for example.
For me it definitely was
>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.
>beyond my level before I could iterate on it with AI
So you agree that you're dependent on an LLM to do your work?
From what I’ve seen they get to the level of understanding of systems way faster than we did because they iterate and experiment with this from day one. We had to spend years understanding code syntax, and other minutia.
Also, you need a different kind of toolset/skillset to grok a system that was vibe coded all the way - different failure scenarios. Older devs tend to just say “see, I told you, it’s just spaghetti underneath, you need to clean it up”, and the newer gen learns to work with that spaghetti.
I have a blazor app in poduction, Codex made errors which it could not fix and it required me reading documentation. I won't argue that it didn't make my life simpler, tasks which would take me days are done in hours, sometimes without touching code.
Yea, i still deal with a ton of code in AI heavy workflows. If anything the frustrating part is absorbing the code quickly enough. AI (Claude for me) writes in cryptic text and the code flows can often be non-obvious.
I need (and am exploring) custom review tooling to improve this AI->Human code flow. Reviewing PRs were always the hardest part for me in programming. They were often full of the developers decisions and you have to rediscover those as you're reading code for it to make sense[1]. However i find this even more difficult to discover these decisions from AI.
However unlike human PRs we can ask more of AI. Rarely have i had a developer put on a presentation for a PR - but AI could right? AI could produce a guided walkthrough of the code. Not sure if it will help of course, but my thought is we're all stuck in the old "PR review flow" but instead of PRs it's AI - and the volume of them is far greater than anything prior. So i expect we need to tweak how we review, how we get information from LLMs.
[1]: I'm speaking generally, and about larger PRs. Not some small func where you can easily see what it does. Business logic and complex code can be difficult to decipher in PRs, imo.
I'm building https://pyor.review to fix this problem, try it out and let me know what you think.
Lots of people mention this higher abstraction level but its not really the case. C has a grammar. You write C and get C as output. Assembly is hidden from the user. Natural language also has a grammar ("sort of"). You write prose into your preferred cli/app of choice BUT it outputs code in C or other language. So its basically a code generator. A code generator is not even remotely a form of abstraction. Its just a facade that breaks down as soon as the generator fails to produce a meaningful result.
thanks i hate it
luckily there are still some people who know and care about actually understanding what is happening. but dwindling. market correction needed to wash larpers out
I offer this, as someone who is heavy into AI development (as a coding assistant, not vibe-coding). I was pretty fast before and now I'm easily an order of magnitude faster.
* I scrutinize every line of backend code and frequently make revisions.
* I pay just barely enough attention to the frontend code to make sure it's not doing anything dumb.
* I pay zero attention to the CSS.
Either our expectations for UI interaction are going to go up a lot, or FE devs should start looking at product management roles. I think the asteroid metaphor is apt.
writing about your dates with an ai prompt are not that interesting
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 the reader needs from my doc at the end of the day. Claude can answer questions based on what the reader is curious about and wants to learn.
Some types of document are still useful, namely higher-level directional or philosophical topics about the intention of a codebase. e.g. "we would like to eventually move X system to Rust for Y reason", "we chose mutable data structures over immutable in this part of the system because Z". But fewer than before.
Yeah, I feel similarly, and kinda grieve how this is not longer a valued skill... I think I've cultivated my taste in many important social dimensions through thinking about what is important to leave in docs and in a note. It's a little strange to know that rarely will people do this work of honing this sense anymore...
> A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date.
Good documentation does not explain "the how", it captures "the why."
Even the latter can be done automatically from meeting notes, tickets etc.
In my useless opinion, most people are not aware of how big AI is and how bigger it will be in 3~5 years. It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem, but there are people who are completely blind about it
Nobody is aware, but neither are you. We may as well have plateaued already. You don't know that.
Even if that is the case, the current models are already revolutionary. We would spend years discovering all the capabilities of these things. And that is considering that the plateau would last for years. And I didn't say that nobody is aware. There are some people that follows the breakthroughs and model releases (in my life), and they agree with me
I don’t think we're anywhere near the plateau. AI is still expensive and slow. Make it realtime, local and nearly-free and you got a problem.
> It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem
Like hunger and diseases are global problems not to be worried about.
I think they meant more along the lines of "This narrow problem today is not worth worrying about, because soon it will be a larger and bigger problem. "
That's still a silly argument though
How about we worry about this smaller problem today so the bigger problem tomorrow is less big. Or doesn't materialize at all?
Do we have to sleepwalk off this cliff?
The asteroid is the author and his horrible attitude towards software development. People giving in like this is an indication that they really didnt have much to offer in the first place and viewed "dev experience" as he puts it as just some way to be clever.
Also when someone says something like "I literally worked on a browser performance team", using the parlance of a middle school cheerleader to describe that work, I dont have a feeling that these experts bowing out is really going to have much impact.
In general, I have always felt UI, and UI adjacent developers to be the least serious of us and this article backs that up.