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by mavamaarten 307 days ago
I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is.

I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a fire breaks out.

I get it - the hype is based around the quick gains you can absolutely have. The gains are insane, I have been able to be more productive at boilerplate and repetitive tasks too. But just building software isn't hard. Building software that lasts, building software that is rock solid, efficient and maintainable, that's hard!

It's sickening to me how quickly people want to throw that in the garbage. All because it saves a few $ in development time, quality is suddenly a metric that is completely ignored, rather than weighed in.

It's going to bite people in the ass.

1 comments

Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years).

I agree with you we should have quality standard, but I also think it's 100% inevitable that this will all go out the window, in most companies and if that happens, our asses will be bitten.

Design/layout/ux have value (and I don't think you're saying they don't!) - when it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing, the result is perceivably better than when it's done by somebody like me who learned HTML for her myspace blog. Stuff like accessibility, "responsive design," theming, and stuff I probably haven't even heard of, all make websites easier and more intuitive to use.

As a silly example, an LLM will happily add all sorts of animated gifs to the screen for me, even if it makes the page take three times as long to load and more difficult to use.

It's a shame to lose well-crafted experiences in favor of the lowest-common-denominator that LLMs put out, just because they're cheaper.