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by SiliconSplash 485 days ago
> If you're asking about performance and memory, then yes, it does.

Most places just don't care. I've worked 15 years as a contractor and only in once place have the business cared about optimisation. As long as it wasn't unbearable than it was "good enough".

> This is especially true in e-commerce where many studies have shown that overall page performance has a correlation to conversion. Add to that the fact that a lot of e-commerce has moved to mobile web, there's a strong case for picking the best performing technologies versus developer preference -- especially if AI is generating it.

This may have been true back in 2014. 5G networks are pretty fast and the the mobile web is pretty bloated. Performance is way down the list of concerns typically even by places that should care. I can write blazingly fast custom JS frameworks, the number of times anyone cares is exactly one time.

> I do my day-to-day work on an M3 Max with 64GB RAM and fiber to the home; it's easy for developers to forget that many times, their end users can be on older devices, on low performing networks, and other factors that affect performance and usability of web applications.

I have a 2010 Dell E6410 with 8GB of ram and an i7 640M (Dual Core, 4 thread). Almost every modern phone is faster now.

I am not arguing we should make things bloated. I am just saying there isn't an incentive to optimise for low end devices because low end is better than a reasonably power Business Laptop of 10-15 years ago.

> why would you waste time and energy to create your own calendar component? But if an LLM can generate any bespoke component that you need in < 3 seconds, do you still need a third party component library?

The code from the LLM probably hasn't been battle tested. The open source react component library with 1000s of stars on github definitely has been. If you run into a problem with the LLM code you are probably going to be by yourself fixing it. I will take the component library over the LLM code everyday of the week.

1 comments

Have you ever worked for a place that cared about meeting CWV? Poor JS performance will definitely hurt rankings.
Yes. It was one contract only and I was the lead frontend dev.

I wrote a very lightweight JS framework (it was just a few classes really) so we could have plugins. A plugin implemented was just an object that implemented an interface, I also wrote a poor man's React for two or three pages that needed to build a lot of DOM Dynamically.

At launch the site was getting basically 100 on the lighthouse tests with the gzipped CSS and JS coming it at ~80KB. Of course that lasted for a week because people will put up a huge image that hasn't been optimised for the web.

The site was fast because I wrote it like a website from mid-2000s. Everything was basic OOP and almost all the code was procedural.