[weitendorf]

I can’t help but think part of the problem is that web development is also an impediment to learning web development.

IME there is a lot more arcana and trivia necessary to write frontend/web applications than most other kinds of software, mostly because it’s both regular programming and HTML/CSS/browser APIs. While you can build a generalized intuition for programming, the only way to master the rest of the content is through sheer exposure - mostly through tons of googling, reading SO, web documentation, and trial and error getting it do the thing. If you’re lucky you might have a more experienced mentor to help you. And yes, there are trivia and arcana needed to be productive in any programming domain, but you can drop a freshly minted CS undergrad into a backend engineering role and expect them to be productive much faster than with frontend (perhaps partly why frontend tends to have a higher proportion of developers with non-CS backgrounds).

It doesn’t help that JavaScript and browsers are typically “fail and continue”, nor that there may be several HTML/CSS/browser features all capable of implementing the same behavior but with caveats and differences that are difficult to unearth even from reading the documentation, such as varying support across browsers or bad interactions with other behavior.

LLMs are super helpful dealing with the arcana. I’m recently writing a decent amount of frontend and UI code after spending several years doing backend/systems/infra - I am so much more productive with LLMs than without, especially when it comes to HTML and CSS. I kind of don’t care that I’ll never know the theory behind “the right way to center a div” - as long as the LLM is good enough at doing it for me why does it matter? And if it isn’t, I’ll begrudgingly go learn it. It’s like caring that people don’t know the trick to check “is a number even” in assembly.