The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

(nolanlawson.com)

40 points by codechicago2772 hours ago

7 comments

comrade12342 hours ago
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.
- jonathanlydall1 hour ago
 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.
 - Wowfunhappy51 minutes ago
 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.
 - thaumasiotes46 minutes ago
 Does updating the website bring in additional money?
 - Wowfunhappy44 minutes ago
 Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers. Otherwise why update the website at all?
 ElProlactin12 minutes ago
 > 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.
 bayindirh26 minutes ago
 Changing office address? New qualifications? Better copy?
 bryanrasmussen5 minutes ago
 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.
 bayindirh1 minute ago
 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.
 thaumasiotes27 minutes ago
 > Otherwise why update the website at all?Because you have it.
- snakeboy26 minutes ago
 > 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.
 - comrade123415 minutes ago
 Just like if you're a programmer the company paying you owns the work.
- technion23 minutes ago
 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.
 - reaperducer14 minutes ago
 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.
- xyst59 minutes ago
 show us these "corporate websites"
 - comrade123427 minutes ago
 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.
- latchkey1 hour ago
 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.
 - throwayay49291 hour ago
 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
 - Gualdrapo1 hour ago
 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.
 - latchkey1 hour ago
 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.
 toyg2 minutes ago
 > you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business modelI'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.
 - latchkey1 hour ago
 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.
Supermancho17 minutes ago
> 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.
rudi-c1 hour ago
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.
- kolinko4 minutes ago
 Even the latter can be done automatically from meeting notes, tickets etc.
paulpauper2 hours ago
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.
- j4yav2 hours ago
 Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer
 - chpatrick30 minutes ago
 Typing the code was never the interesting part.
 - qalmakka5 minutes ago
 For me it definitely was
 - jplusequalt28 minutes ago
 >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.
 - avgDev21 minutes ago
 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.
 unshavedyak3 minutes ago
 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.
 - hirvi7452 minutes ago
 That is why I am very thankful for my job. We are not really allowed to use LLMs for much of anything.
- whateveracct2 hours ago
 thanks i hate it
- sitzkrieg2 hours ago
 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
pmestha31 minutes ago
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jdw641 hour ago
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sitzkrieg2 hours ago
writing about your dates with an ai prompt are not that interesting