[kristianc]

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

You can argue that abstractions hide consequences that fall on users who didn't choose them, but I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

[m132]

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acceptable" and "decent" has thus been widening. As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". And the push is understandable as well, it's MVPs that make money and details only "increase customer satisfaction" at best (and these days, who even cares about customers?).

The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality, maybe even job satisfaction in general. As an (unfortunately anecdotal) example, I started to find myself fixing up broken websites or removing elements that get in the way with dev tools and uBlock every once in a while, and have heard from other people on here that they have been doing the same (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042747). All to restore basic functionality of websites I go on. This was never required back in the day, Flash and early web browsers didn't even have the option to do this.

Another, less anecdotal example from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

It gets worse when you realize that most of the money saved through these cuts only benefits the very top of the hierarchy.

[hombre_fatal]

> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP

Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend.

The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for things that you weren't going to spend time caring about anyways and, more importantly, (2) you can encode these things into prompts (AGENTS.md) and processes so that they happen even when you weren't going to invest the time with or without AI. For a lot of people this only means collecting some generic "skills" they found online yet it's still much better than what they were going to do pre-AI.

That's why I think AI is saving software in some ways, not leading to worse software.

Or, asserting that AI will botch software might hold more weight with people who have already forgotten how dogshit software was pre-AI.

[m132]

I can somewhat see your point, but it is generally accepted that a wrong ARIA is worse than none, and LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing, the more decent ones heavily emphasize in-depth human code reviews.

If our hypothetical developer hasn't used any accessibility-related tags before, what chance is there that those parts of the website will receive adequate testing?

[hombre_fatal]

Testing is an even more powerful subject here since we barely do it.

Testing is so hard that we'll agree that, e.g., TDD is great (e.g. ensure your tests actually test something, ensure your code is testable from the start) yet we never do it. And when we do write tests, we are on the hook to be eternally vigilant that they are not stale, that they test something real, that they are not redundant. And they often turn into an append-only file that you resent.

Meanwhile, AI is happy to write tests, do red-green TDD cycles, refactor them, prune them, update them, justify and defend them. It will even incidentally write tests for the most aloof vibe-coder by accident because they didn't specify otherwise.

Overnight, I went from never testing most of my side projects (except for, say, maybe unit tests in more straightforward things like a parser) to now everything is tested end-to-end. Every time I make a new directional / architectural decision, the tests the AI writes also encode it at the test level to reenforce the decision.

It's strictly a better world for software because AI can write and maintain tests.

> LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing

But tests also help humans and ensure human-written software is robust. We only don't test because they are so costly to write and maintain, and our software has always suffered for it. Or the tests become such an unmaintainable mess that our software is now worse because of it!

[majormajor]

I've gotten a lot of value out of LLM tools but without extensive feedback and direction I've found even the newer version of Opus pretty bad at writing good tests. First drafts are full of tests with some of these characteristics:

- good test, wrong layer, would turn into a mess of "wait why'd tests over there blow up for changes over here"

- mostly-good test, subtle issue (yes, this is the status quo with most human-written tests, but the risk of not being careful is that you (or the agent you throw at crap) now is overconfident in your future changes)

- weird silly test like "assert that calling the six statements in this method in the right order do the right thing" without... actually calling the method itself... so don't protect against changes to the method?

For non-greenfield work I've recently been much more happy with their out of the box code change quality then their attempts at adding coverage for those changes!

I think this is an area that has remained hard because putting directives in CLAUDE.md or whatnot for tests is generally gonna be so generic to be useless, like "put tests in the right place" without more module-specific context. Whereas if I'm making a non-greenfield change, I'm thinking much more in my prompt about constraints on the code itself, and much less about the current shape/state/organization of the tests or what to direct it on.

Properly used it's great. Definitely improved my test coverage a lot.

But it's entirely still in the world of "people who'd care to write good code before will write good code faster; other people will just write mediocre code faster."

[skydhash]

> Meanwhile, AI is happy to write tests, do red-green TDD cycles, refactor them, prune them, update them, justify and defend them. It will even incidentally write tests for the most aloof vibe-coder by accident because they didn't specify otherwise.

I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable? Why? because of all the mocks and scenarios that didn’t matter. And on top of that, tests are additional code to maintain.

These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden. I focus on integration test (whole modules) and if I have the time, on a harness to do e2e testing.

[icedchai]

Many humans do the same thing. They write tests that mock so much of the actual code, the "test" is not testing much at all, except perhaps the developer's ability to basically turn the code inside out. It's often just a large volume of crap that has to be maintained (or eventually deleted.)

I agree integration tests are best, with some e2e testing for common scenarios.

I worked at a place that required unit tests for every new method or function. Arguments like "this other (integration) test already covers that. why do I have to add another test?" wouldn't fly. PR reviews would often degrade into arguments about testing and how all database access needed to be mocked...

[mega_dean]

> I read some AI generated tests and while it looks visually impressive, ultimately it wasn’t doing anything valuable

I just saw this comment yesterday about one of the tests from Bun’s rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314311 It reads in the raw source code and uses a regex to assert that “unsafe” is used.

> These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden

I’ve come to the same conclusion, but that’s only because I’m working on solo projects. I think they are probably worth it with multiple devs on the same project.

[ThunderSizzle]

My instructions and steering is to force the LLM agent to focus on mocking only system boundaries and outside in unit testing. I've found these two make verbose but good tests that actually prove behavior pretty well.

But that was my testing strategy already, but writing one of those tests could take legitimately hours with how many columns and crazy rules our area has.

[kakugawa]

a11y testing is non-trivial. axe-core can automatically detect many types of issues. However, enough compliance (to avoid being sued) needs end-to-end testing and human judgement. e.g. keyboard traps, focus restoration, alt-text, etc.

[PaulHoule]

0% if by testing you mean "somebody who uses a screen reader regularly was able to use the product successfully" because nobody seems to do that.

[sillyfluke]

>asserting that AI will botch software might hold more weight with people who have already forgotten how dogshit software was pre-AI.

You're responding to an assertion with an assertion. It has been empirically proven that SOTA models can create more dogshit software than pre-AI software. It is also trivially known that the user is unable to predict when and how the AI will introduce dogshit into the software. We literally had a study posted on this forum claiming models give more accurate answers if you're mean to them. This is the shit we're dealing with. Stuff you couldn't make up in a dystopian Douglas Adams novel.

>you can encode these things into prompts

Is this satire? SOTA models randomly disobey rules in prompts all the time.

When a dev drops a production db I can warn them. If they do it multiple times during their employment I can change their roles or fire them.

I can count the number of companies providing SOTA models with the fingers on my hands. Imagine having an employee pool of only 5 savant coders with dementia to choose from to hire to your company. That's it. Thats the entire applicant pool. You can only fire one of them by hiring one of the other four to replace them with. And you can't really fire them for dropping production dbs if you can't prevent the other ones from making the same mistake. This is the current AI-first hellscape as it stands.

[d0liver]

I would much rather have software that works but lacks accessibility features than software that's broken but also has some broken accessibility features sprinkled in. The former is useful to many people, while the latter is useful to no one.

But the key here is: LLMs don't have latent rigor, nor any other kind of rigor.

[hombre_fatal]

But software was already in a horrible state before AI, so your dichotomy doesn't work.

The status quo with pre-AI Human Written software on a pedestal is that it doesn't work, and it lacks accessibility, polish, performance considerations, UX considerations, tests, and more.

The built-in rigor is trivial to prove. Just put Opus 4.8 in plan mode and tell it to plan something, like a vt100 emulator.

The question isn't whether you can do better than AI, because you'll put your foot on the scale and give yourself infinite time, attention, and energy just so you can say yes. It's whether AI can do as good or better than you with the same time, attention, and energy you would have given a task in the first place.

[d0mine]

In practice, you would use an already written implementation, maintained by somebody else. An option that is often ignored by LLM (copy-paste galore).

For example, imagine if textual-serve author would reimplement xterm.js What effect it would make on quality.

LLMs increase technical debt rapidly. It is unclear whether they can deal with the mess they create. But we'll know soon (no need to wait years, to get immovable mess).

The positive side of LLMs is that they confirm experimentally the usefulness of many software engineering practices (testing,docs, adrs, design, formal specs etc)

[icedchai]

A couple months back, I had Sonnet build me a browser-based VT-100 terminal emulator. I then had it build me a websocket-to-telnet gateway for connecting some old retro systems to it. Both worked pretty well.

Could I have done it on my own? Yes, eventually. The problem is I would've lost interest and moved on to some other useless project before getting that far.

[d0liver]

> software was already in a horrible state before AI, so your dichotomy doesn't work.

It depends on the software. But, generally speaking, I try to use and write the best software available that solves my problem, even if it's one of a kind; it doesn't really matter if the other 99.9999% of the software in the space is broken.

Given 1000 hours to work on a problem, an LLM will continue to yeet out mediocre variations on a theme. Give me 1000 hours to work, and my product will keep getting 1% or 2% better until it's much better than any shit an LLM would spit out.

Similarly, I would much rather use someone else's emulator that they spent 1000 hours on than have AI yeet out some mediocre shit that kinda works, but is really just a mindless exploitation of something that someone else wrote that was actually good.

Then, you follow that with, "Yeah, but AI just allows you to iterate faster and skip the boring stuff, so that you make your product better even faster."

And then I follow that with, "The part where you take it apart piece by piece and study each piece and get kicked in the head by the realities of your lack of understanding is the part that's actually valuable, and it's precisely what you're skipping with an LLM"

[saltyoldman]

I think higher up in the thread it was already argued and agreed that the rigor is generally already present, and can be doubly sure to exist in agents.md.

You get a lot of things for free with LLMs. You program an input box that goes to a form, handle the backend, make sure the variable names match the box, the API, the data structures and the database columns. All the brain matter making sure that flow works is mastered by an LLM since even with GPT 3.5 (not that I am advocating using that anymore). But the point is, since that's taken care of, why not also let it handle aria, input hints, mouse effects, state storage, animations since most of it's handled by putting "handle aria, input hints, mouse effects, state storage, animations" any time the front end files are changed." in agents.md

I would say that's rigor. Now you go a step further and have another LLM in your QA cycle that double checks it.

[selicos]

With the right harness/agent/skill setup and requirements work, this (any specificity) can become part of the workflow from early stages.

Setting that up and making sure it works, at the early stages, is not what LLMs do best, today. This sort of work is possibly incredibly valuable in the next 12-36 months, depending on what LLMs can be designed to do out of the box.

An Agent that can deliver the correct legal review process for a patent and is correct often enough to validate the savings vs real humans, or at least the speed increase + manual review ala code reviews, is incredibly valuable.

Are we there yet? Maybe this is where current groups like FNCR are trying to go.

[PunchyHamster]

> That's why I think AI is saving software in some ways, not leading to worse software.

So far the way AI is making software better is mostly checking for common bugs and acting as review/pair programming buddy, not the code.

The code is bad. At best okay. But you can make a lot of it. And it's not bad enough to not be good enough.

[harshitaneja]

I don't have the same rosy memory of the history as you do. I remember very regularly having to wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling and doing all kinds of voodoo I could to get sites to run, sites I used fine the day prior. Figuring it all out on my oh so slow connection and hoping no one calls the landline lest it stops all the progress. Not saying it wasn't a fun period of chaos and I everyday wish for internet to become the wild west it once was. It was acceptable in the sense that I didn't know it could be better, I was used to OS hanging and crashing regularly on my oh-so-fancy dual core system as well regularly so it was all acceptable.

Today I find myself having less patience for it all, because things just tend to work a lot more often than they don't.

With AI, I find so many small businesses and others I deal with which have their own websites have started to have better design, better performance and while I don't know if they are really accessible but they tend to have more prevalence of aria labels.

Not to take away from your experiences, just sharing my anecdotes.

[torginus]

Personally the biggest conceptual problem with HTML/CSS is that it's incredibly unintuitive with mapping to real-world concepts, and not low-level (or straightforward) enough so that the low-level primitives are easy to manipulate.

For example, WPF programs can have great accessibility - this comes from the fact that programmers can manipulate primitives which are semantically meaningful (buttons, lists etc).

In HTML its just a sea of divs which lately have become an implementation detail to hang classes on to, and sometimes not even exposed directly to the developer, if you use a SPA framework.

There's not a snowballs chance in hell you can build a quality accesibility solution on top of that.

HTML's main idea was that HTML was a document model, that described the content in a semantically meaningful way, and CSS was the 'rest' which kind of allowed to make the whole thing pretty - the idea going as far as separating content from looks should allow people to 'theme' their websites and completely redefine layout.

That idea has been completely abadoned. I'm not a frontend dev - although I can make a competent webpage by myself, I don't have deep insights into what's going on in the field - maybe Web Components will allow people to create semantically meaningful pages in a standard way?

Maybe there should be another layer of abstraction on top of what we have - which is truly semantic, this time for real?

[MDCore]

The sea of divs and the abandonment of HTMLs is a result of the poorly built frameworks. Actual HTML and CSS has not abandoned those core ideas, and the frameworks often reimplement native features badly (e.g. the shadcdn radio button example). HTML crafted with care is not a sea of divs, it is markup one can read that logically and cleanly describes what you see.

[vitally3643]

You're describing the state that software was already in prior to AI. Usability, accessibility, intuitiveness have all gone down the toilet in the blind drive to make everything "sleek" and "modern" by removing all text, reducing programs to hieroglyphs floating in a sea of padding. Removing features so somebody can say they changed something. We've refused the notion that software can ever be finished and now have to find some way to justify endlessly updating software forever.

AI might make the problem worse, it might not. But the problems you outline and the sharply declining computer literacy they bring are already here, driven 100% by human developers.

[carlosjobim]

> As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable".

Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem?

> The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality

If you have 10 people eating steak and 10 people starving, then giving rice to the starving people would also sharply decrease dinner quality.

AI software is not the difference between good or bad, it's the difference between something or nothing.

[SiempreViernes]

> Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem?

Contrary to what you seem to believe, cars and bicycles are different kinds of things, not two versions of the same fundamental type, so this rhetorical question doesn't make much sense (consider that also your legs provide the function of transportation but are nevertheless not a kind of car).

[handelaar]

> Contrary to what you seem to believe

Please stop doing this. That is not even close to what he said.

"Some people" do that? Not a controversial statement, and pretending otherwise is to argue in bad faith.

[m132]

I'm afraid that there's never been a shortage of poor quality software

[hnthrow0287345]

This is why the 'craft' should be left to open source for most commercial software. The business reality just doesn't care for it.

Only when you have a PR problem does the business switch back to signalling quality, like Microsoft, although it remains to be seen if they still have the quality part. Most of the craftspeople get to say 'told you so' but also it looks like a sinking ship to them. Once the PR problem is gone, it's back to shipping at the expense of quality.

This cycle conflicts with the idea of a craft, which is that you should do it that way all/most of the time. The business will stop caring about quality long enough that your skills will erode, making it a bad mix. Trying to practice a craft where you aren't in control of this cycle is corrosive to the spirit.

[customguy]

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then?

> More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

That I agree with. The more the merrier, all else being the same. And if "AI" trickled into everything because of the undeniable improvements it leads to, the situation and most of the sentiments would be very different, I think.

But even then, people aren't entitled to the knowledge "created" by doing the work. If attribution and compensation were tackled in earnest, if you could only train on the materials of the people you pay to produce those materials, it might be much quicker and cheaper to just learn CSS.

[aspenmartin]

> No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then?

It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories?

> But even then, people aren't entitled to the knowledge "created" by doing the work. If attribution and compensation were tackled in earnest, if you could only train on the materials of the people you pay to produce those materials, it might be much quicker and cheaper to just learn CSS.

OSS code and people’s public writings are available to anyone all the time. Common Crawl, the open source web crawl dump, has been around for over a decade. No one had any problem with these systems being developed on them, until they finally started to become useful, so what’s the sort of legal or ethical framework you’re pointing to?

[customguy]

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories?

Assume everybody is now using LLM because they're better, and because the people who created artisanal things in their free time out of sheer generosity no longer have free time, or any food at all, or simply no longer feel generous. And the few people who are such specialists that they would be slowed down by them only do proprietary work, for lots of money.

What then? LLM learning from LLM doesn't really work, does it?

This is not intended as some kind of gotcha, to me this is a huge elephant on the couch.

> No one had any problem with these systems being developed on them, until they finally started to become useful, so what’s the sort of legal or ethical framework you’re pointing to?

That it's perfectly fine for people to say "I was fine with that, but I'm not fine with this". They can give you detailed explanations for their individual decisions, every single one of them, but there is no point in discussing them in aggregate because that aggregate is an abstraction. And they're optional, too, it's not like people have to give an explanation, and aren't simply free to change their mind for no or for bad reasons.

[stellar678]

Presuming that conventions, standards, best-practices will continue to evolve as people do this work - whether with or without AI - I can't see any reason why the resulting advancements wouldn't be published in a way that builds a record for the future.

My documentation tends to be more thorough and well-maintained when I'm building software with a coding agent. A million tokens of context tends to be better at that kind of thing than my own brain when I'm neck-deep in solving a difficult problem.

And presuming the best practices are adequate and don't need to evolve (which seems unlikely) - then the current public historical record is also adequate.

[aspenmartin]

> Assume everybody is now using LLM because they're better, and because the people who created artisanal things in their free time out of sheer generosity no longer have free time, or any food at all, or simply no longer feel generous. And the few people who are such specialists that they would be slowed down by them only do proprietary work, for lots of money.

> What then? LLM learning from LLM doesn't really work, does it?

Oh what no that’s exactly how it works, even today. RL with verification is done with synthetic data and rejection sampling. If something can’t get done purely with an agent that needs to get done it’s done with human help, this will always be the case it will just get rare-er.

> That it's perfectly fine for people to say "I was fine with that, but I'm not fine with this".

Agree with you there, but there’s a theme or insinuation (not saying you’re saying this) that these companies “stole work” (which definitely a lot of copyright violations sure), but it’s just unclear to me what principles or legal frameworks these companies or institutions should have used to develop the technology. I don’t really even know whether I mean to imply it’s not unethical, moreso I’m looking for a steel man argument to this. But of course people are entitled to their value systems and judgements and to point out real harm.

[customguy]

> there’s a theme or insinuation (not saying you’re saying this) that these companies “stole work” (which definitely a lot of copyright violations sure), but it’s just unclear to me what principles or legal frameworks these companies or institutions should have used to develop the technology.

Oh, I'm absolutely one of the people saying that a lot of companies stole a lot of work, and that it would be better to dissolve them and make all their assets public domain, than to stand for it.

The legal and moral framework is to ask for permission, accept "no". The same framework they use against you in an instant, with an army of lawyers, when you do to them what they did to everybody.

None of this in principle, technically, requires slurping up everything and ignoring consent, that just made it quicker and cheaper, that's why they did it. While they did that, I'm sure other labs made progress in the same direction at much smaller pace, in a defensible manner, of which they should get to keep the fruit.

[visarga]

> What then? LLM learning from LLM doesn't really work, does it?

It does work, it is called RLVR, reinforcement learning from verified rewards, is is based on testing code by execution. It's become a major area of improvement in the last year. But you are also forgetting the amount of steering and problem solving going into coding agents today, and the huge logs they create which can feedback into training. We automated stackoverflow, LLM learns from usage and self play.

[8note]

still though, whats causing the old code to disappear? the old discussions to disappear?

theyve already been added to all the big labs' datasets, its not like its going anywhere.

but even moreso, accessibility tools exist because people need them, and will make it known when the accessibility is broken.

the screen reader is still gonna expose an api or have observable outputs.

There's very real forcing functions that will keep making useful content about what people want and need from accessibility tools, and how to interact with existing tools.

you're still building for people and the harness operator as time goes on, will probably be the actual user, and will push the LLM to adjust the code to be great for them

[oblio]

> It can read the code? Historical discussions around it? Commit histories?

And if everyone bunkers up and all that open content dries up starting in 2026, let's say, what happens?

[kristianc]

It won't happen, for two reasons. One is that great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway. Finer grained controls over opt-outs would be great (the equivalent of a search engine 'nofollow' would be great and will hopefully come with time).

Many kinds of technology faced this kind of tragedy of the commons argument in the past and it never bears out. Printing presses copied manuscripts, search engines copied and indexed web pages, open-source software was incorporated into commercial products, Wikipedia repackaged knowledge produced elsewhere.

In almost all cases the total amount of creation increases because the technology lowered costs, expanded audiences, or created new forms of value. The speed of creation of new 'View Source' outpaces the number of people pulling back.

[bayarearefugee]

> great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward anyway and people will continue to do it anyway.

A lot of open-source software was supported by developers having stable well-paying jobs that didn't burn them out and afforded them enough free time to work on passion projects on the side, so that even if their company wasn't directly supporting their OSS development, there was still an indirect link.

Not only is this likely to increasingly change in the future as people need to spend more time navigating the disruption AI will have on labor, it already visibly has been changing over the past year.

One of the top posts on HN today is someone leaving open source and tech completely to work at Home Depot -- while this is an extreme case it isn't wholly unique to what I'm seeing in many places since 2025.

[watwut]

It will happen and it already started to happen. It started to happen even before LLM, when google started to hide smaller personal blogs in its search result. Expectation of the monetary reward has nothing to do with it, discoverability does. Culture of creating content does not exist when people cant see what others created and know no one will see what they created. A lot of smaller open source was monkey see monkey do thing - we have seen other open source projects and wanted something like that. Likewise with tutorials, we have seen other people write cool tutorials and felt like creating own and showing it out.

That is not the dynamic with LLM. You see LLM output, but original creator is hidden. And if you write your own, no one will find it. Worst, other people will tell you "LLM could have write it" in reaction ... so people wont bother.

> search engines copied and indexed web pages

Notably, search engines sent people toward web pages. And when search engines stopped doing that and started to copy content, those original pages started to die out.

> Printing presses copied manuscripts

Printing press made dissemination easier. It is an equivalent of early internet, not of LLM.

> open-source software was incorporated into commercial products

Commercial product using open source library had different user then the library it is using. And crucially, it is not hiding that library from the library user.

> Wikipedia repackaged knowledge produced elsewhere

Yes, and we collectively create less encyclopedias. They are not worth writing and checking for correctness anymore, so we don't do that all that much anymore.

[visarga]

The centralized choke point of web search is getting relaxed now. Unlike search engines and social networks, you can download a LLM and run it. A small one, but capable of using a library of search stubs to directly fetch information from hubs, feeds and other search engines. You can own the agent who can solve the web search part for you.

Imagine you have a 4B model and keep an equal size corpus of search stubs, small MD documents linking to hubs, feeds and search engines for millions of topics. You can use the LLM to read the stub and perform the search for you, all orchestrated locally, with greater privacy and independence. You can dis-intermediate the search chokepoint now. You can set the criteria for what to include, exclude, how to rank and present the results.

This works because good entry points for any topic change slowly over time. The construction of search stubs is trivial with existing AI agents, and can be shared as open source. A few GB for the model, a few for the search routing layer, and you got a sovereign local agent.

If this holds, access control shifts from whatever Google thinks maximizes profit to whatever the community thinks has value.

[citrin_ru]

I'm personally was fine with contributing to open-source without any financial reward. But I'm reluctant to release anything in public now because it will be eventually incorporated into the training set for the technology which will (or at least can) lave me without a job and chances to find one.

[customguy]

> In almost all cases the total amount of creation increases because the technology lowered costs

But this doesn't lower the cost of learning and writing CSS, it just scoops up some of it and offers that cheaply, and even that only because it's offered below cost. If anything I'd say it increases the cost, because now you don't get paid to get and be good at what an LLM is supposedly good enough at, and have less free time to do it anyway. You may not even have a computer because your current one broke and you can't afford a new one.

[justinclift]

> [a] great deal of open-source software and hobbyist knowledge sharing has never been driven by financial reward

It seems like a lot of the underlying sentiment which was driving that was to contribute to the world and make things better for our fellow people.

Working on OSS software sure doesn't feel as rewarding in the last few years, so I've personally stepped back from 99% of what I do. As have more public people that have worked on OSS for a long time.

[aspenmartin]

Well that historical content and code still exists right? Are you just saying “what if we’re in a world of walled gardens now that OSS dies because people don’t want their work stolen” in which case: these companies will get data and they don’t need OSS anymore. It’s already webcrawled or licensed or commissioned, they pay people to generate novel traces when they need it or at the very least sets of prompts and tests for verification. Then synthetic data gets added to the training set, the ones that are verified.

[oblio]

This is super hilarious :-)))

Do you think creating the orders of magnitude of content the internet produced organically and which LLM creators are stealing is cheap? If they actually have to pay for content creation while competing with content creators on the you know, content creation front via LLM-generation, the entire business model of LLMs collapses.

You can't have the mountains of data needed for LLMs in the decades to come, if your LLMs put the writers and artists out of work.

[aspenmartin]

It’s literally how these models are trained today. They of course use open source data but that’s no longer the most important source, it’s high quality prompts and verifiable tests and a lot of inference compute. They also have massive flywheels from users from which they can mine good data or at the very least again good prompts which can be just as important.

[customguy]

That sounds like it would reduce the blazing progress of the last decades to a snail's pace, some twilight where software is just average, as it always was and always will be. That people will always do the thing the opposite of which is now incentivized doesn't convince me, basically. If just using the LLM gets you ahead in a time of severe pressure, then most people will do that, and by the time anyone realizes they kinda need a FEW people to actually be able to reason about something from start to finish, it might be to late.

We're not such a smart species. It's not like we managed so far. We're just adding unsolved problems, and distract ourselves with even bigger problems. The world could have been fed and clothed by the mid 20th century and we could have solved climate change by the 1980s (talking out of my ass here but with confidence in my general point with that), but instead we now throw everything into the furnace. in the hopes it will create a deus ex machina, like in that very bad Isaac Asimov story. I think we are absolutely capable of lobotomizing ourselves (as a species) like a toddler playing with an electrical socket shocking itself. I don't say this to be snarky, I honestly think we're that unserious and ignorant about what we do and the environment we do it in.

But I also really should look into what you answered about LLM learning from themselves, I heard it mentioned before but I still have no real clue. I will try to rectify that. I mean, I really, really want to be wrong on this, only a monster wouldn't.

[watwut]

> by the time anyone realizes they kinda need a FEW people to actually be able to reason about something from start to finish, it might be to late.

I dont think it will be "too late" by any reasonable definition. All those things are learnable and companies that will really need to overcome it, will. But, they wont be open with their knowledge. Learning/training will be expensive and once people acquire it, they wont share it like open sources and programming tech blogs did.

[jonathanlydall]

The successful standards, platforms, libraries, tools, etc. will be the ones that LLMs can understand. Like a good GitHub readme, or website, or Discord community, I strongly feel that making sure you've (perhaps personally) written enough about your offering for AI to understand it will be an important factor in how successful it can be in markets or communities.

I wrote a similar HN comment around this yesterday, but the short version is that we found for our product that the years of investment in our Docs (which were seemingly never good enough) are now paying enormous dividends in that LLMs seem to understand our product really well. This has manifested in the LLM in our product being highly effective and a few additional clients who found us through AI chats. Turns out the problem with our Docs wasn't so much with their content, but rather that people just weren't looking at them much.

[nailer]

> They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then?

That’s a good question but I suspect when new technologies come out, the normally indecipherable specs released by industry groups (which is why we needed blogs) will be deciphered by LLMs. Not saying this is good or bad (it’s likely both) just saying it.

[sasmithjr]

> Once they no longer write about it, what then?

The AI will no longer be able to reproduce new a11y conventions/guidelines, but if no one is writing about it, do any new a11y conventions/guidelines even exist at that point?

[trjordan]

Totally. Every "we're losing our craft" article has the same gloomy shape. That's enough of a bummer, but they also argue against themselves halfway through.

This one, for instance:

> But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through.

Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical understanding, because there's no way around it. I agree. Why is the whole tone of this thing "AI is making my craft a cheap commodity?"

Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults. Content mills / SEO / news sites are a separate, terrible failure mode of ads and corporate incentives. That's not React's fault!

[knuckleheads]

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

[randlet]

> Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so

This seems like a good insight and it feels true to me as well.

My guess is the absolute number of people who treat it like a "craft" is higher than 20 years ago, but as a fraction of all developers it has shrunk dramatically.

[knuckleheads]

I've been meaning to write down my thoughts about software explicitly not being a craft for many years now and life keeps getting in the way. It's a direct response to the Etsy engineering blog, "Code As Craft". I agree that there are more code craftsmen in general than before, but by percentage there's way more software engineers. Engineering best practices to me are in many ways about robbing coding and software from the mystique of craftsmanship and turning it into a repeatable industrial process that isn't inhumane per se but doesn't depend on any particular person to make it work.

[acedTrex]

Ya it's definitely been an ongoing process. LLMs have just accelerated it.

[knuckleheads]

I am not joking when I say that software craftsmen lost the war when tabs vs spaces was obviated as a point of contention by CI enforced formatting and linting around broader community standards.

[duskdozer]

>Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults.

This is the opposite of my experience. I find websites take much more time to load, are designed to require many more actions and interaction time to navigate, often break and are replaced by a blank page if any error occurs, use huge numbers of ad/tracking requests and JS, and are filled with accessibility-standard-violating unnecessary JS animations.

[bigstrat2003]

> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago.

That is not remotely the case. All software, not just websites, is a lot worse than it was 10 years ago. Bloated, slow, buggy messes that resulted from the industry hiring a bunch of people who just wanted to do the bare minimum and make fat stacks, rather than hiring people who actually care about good engineering.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's just not what I wanted. I got into software because I liked coding, deep technical understanding only excited me because it would help me code better. I don't want to get too "woe is me", there are far worse things in the world than having a vaguely unsatisfying job, but there are life choices I would have made differently had I known coding would be automated in 2026.

[HDThoreaun]

You can still code all you like, youre just not going to get paid for it.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Sure, but I've got other hobbies which better satisfy my itch for making things. Doesn't really solve my problem.

[mbgerring]

> Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago.

Holy shit, no, they are not. What world do you live in?

[TurdF3rguson]

A lot of them weren't even up 10 years ago. It's not hard to be better than that.

[coldtea]

>I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people.

And I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions, all the way to modern multi-MB frameworks and Electron, is a regression.

Of course no one gives a shit about things like the user's computer/memory utilization. Or degraded experience. Or wasted bandwidth. Or the extra energy costs per 8 billion people - and the environmental impact.

>More people building things is straightforwardly good,

Is more people building public infrastructure "straightforwardly good"? If it means worse roads, worse bridges, systems that fail?

The same holds for software. And most things really.

[x0x0]

> feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions

But again, accidental complexity. The web platform is utterly rotten. So the people we should blame are chrome et al for not providing a standard lib or anything approaching a reasonable UI framework, which forces people to reimplement what a competent platform provides.

Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron. I don't think anybody likes building in Electron; it's just it's that or +200% (or more) eng headcount to build 3 apps, one per platform.

[coldtea]

>Electron is an artifact of the richest companies in the world prioritizing their platform monopolies and trying to increase their stranglehold on businesses by forcing them to write platform specific code, which is hysterically expensive to build and maintain. When I'm confronted with writing for web then reimplementing for mac and win... the answer is electron.

And yet we could build native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s, with 1/100 the resources (tutorials, third party libs, native GUI frameworks, IDEs, etc) available, and 1/10th the target user base.

It's not about "platform specific code, being hysterically expensive to build and maintain". It was more expensive in the 1990s and 00s too, but people built it and maintained it just fine.

It's companies chosing convenience.

Especially since it's not poor programmers and small software shops going for Electron. It's the biggest multi-billion to trillion dollar companies.

Facebook uses this crap, Slack uses this crap, Adobe and Google use similar web-based UI crap (in what used to be native apps), and so on.

[cyberrock]

Building is not the same as maintaining and updating. As long as Apple wants to take a week to review every change and occasionally rejecting client versions (insert similar complaints about Microsoft, Google, Linux here), there will still be a case for these technologies.

[x0x0]

> native apps a plenty in the 90s and 2000s

And 1/100th the feature footprint.

[coldtea]

What? They had more features that we gave up, including native platform integration.

[jerhewet]

Microsoft Teams. The poster child for web-based UI crap.

[madeofpalk]

> this is largely accidental complexity.

Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem.

Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other constraints of the web platform.

[troupo]

> I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem.

That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces. You can barely do styled text.

CSS and HTML are literally littered with accidental, ad-hoc, badly thought-out and badly designed one-off solutions, often to problems no one asked for. There's a reason it took until 2026 to animate `height: auto`. There's a reason why `article` "semantic" element has to be used when you display product cards or widgets. There's a reason why CSS scoping has been stuck in limbo for 10+ years. There's a reason...

The web is one of humanity's greatest achievements. But let's not pretend that it's not a textbook study in accidental complexity.

[mbgerring]

> That CSS and web never really addressed did they? There's almost nothing in the web platform to build rich user interfaces. You can barely do styled text.

Let me guess, you stopped reading web standards documents because Facebook told you it didn’t matter, since you could just ship 10MB of javascript with every request

[troupo]

What a nice ad hominem you decided to employ in lieu of an actual argument.

Try again.

[traverseda]

>that has to deal with the other constraints of the web platform.

Well there's your problem right there

[madeofpalk]

Right - but those constraints are inherent to the medium. Like basically unconstrained screen sizes from large desktops to mobile, with the user free to resize anywhere in between (and can't be constrained in the way that 'real' apps often are). Input methods of both fine mouse control, and course touch.

[9rx]

It is a hard problem. That is why in the pre-browser days a small number of entities did the hard work and gave the rest of us mere mortals tidy APIs to make use of their efforts without everyone having to painstakingly duplicate what they created each and every time.

But then CSS came along and threw out the baby with the bathwater, returning us back to the bare primitives, forcing entities to redo all that work again. Except this time CSS didn't offer a good mechanism to wrap up that hard work in a nice API bow, so everyone ended up getting pushed into having to redo that same hard work every time they started a new project, leading to a bunch of poor, inconsistent, and often downright wacky implementations.

To be fair, the problem isn't CSS per se, it is just that it is much too low-level for all but the small number of entities focused on the aforementioned hard problems and browsers failed to offer anything higher-level for the rest of us. Javascript has tried taking on a stand-in role for the lack of the higher-level abstraction being natively offered by the browser, but that comes with its own limitations so it isn't always a viable choice, not to mention that having to resort to using a full programming environment completely defeats the purpose of having CSS.

CSS gets all the hate because it is more often than not the wrong tool for the job but the only tool available at hand.

[skydhash]

CSS is for styling documents, not for creating applications interface (which has a whole sets of constraints). It's like trying to use typographic design rules to create a car dashboard. CSS is great, just not fit for that particular job. There's an handful of properties that are the same (padding, margin, border, background color,...), but one common thing with native toolkits is that they have specific widgets for layouts.

[9rx]

It is for styling documents, but nobody (except for maybe designers trying desperately cling to a job) wants every document to have a bespoke style. I want to use a style created by experts that is consistently shared with every other document across the whole of the internet. CSS is fine as a low-level primitive for those experts, but it is not the mechanism the rest of us should be using. However, there is nothing in-between, at least not unless you lean heavily into Javascript, but, again, if you are going to use a programming environment then CSS is pointless anyway. There are much better ways to draw to screens when you have a programming language at your disposal.

[skydhash]

People do want bespoke style (think booklets) and there’s a load of templates (and frameworks) on the internet if you want a standard set of components. The web as a platform was built for documents, and when we try to twist it to do applications, the crack appears. It’s just the wrong tool for the job.

Javascript is used for the Gnome shell and it’s doing a fine job there. And if you paired javascript to something like Tk (as in Tcl/Tk), I guess it would be fine too. The web primitives are just horrible for desktop uses.

[9rx]

> (think booklets)

That's what PDF is for. CSS is for documents, but namely documents for screens, and on screens you want consistency with all the things on that same screen.

> there’s a load of templates (and frameworks) on the internet if you want a standard set of components.

But not a great way to use them. You can make anything work when you have low-level primitives, so it is not a case that it cannot be done, but that's missing the forest for the trees. You can also program a computer by flipping toggle switches, yet we developed better tools (e.g. programming languages) because sometimes its nice to have more comfortable abstractions.

[PunchyHamster]

> Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem.

I dunno, seemed easier 20+ years ago when in high school we were taught how to use Delphi than now.

HTML/CSS is just terrible way to build interfaces. It was made to build basically resizeable documents, not applications, and it shows in every crevice

[acters]

AI consistently places animated objects behind a blur object which causes the browser to constantly repaint. Google's ai mode introduced one, some other websites clearly vibe codes included them too.

At first it confused me why my GPU usage spiked and fans started blowing harder, but now I see it is a common mistake that AI makes but no one tests properly. It is possible a human can make this mistake but I sheldom experienced this ever in my life until now.

I run 240hz monitors, and that meant the browser was trying to do 240 repaints per second. Blocking it with unlock origin is the only way. Ridiculous

[dannyw]

I used to make a living doing frontend development, and quirks and knowing idiosyncrasies is a burden to your craft. Yes, it meant there were higher barriers to entry, but it also resulted in a lot of broken websites, and I can tell you it was never fun nor rewarding.

I think the original author has a much stronger thesis around AI devaluing the craft of coding, but his specific examples don't stack up.

[fny]

"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.

[emodendroket]

You could argue that most users do not notice or care about this at all so it's a completely reasonable sacrifice to make to have rich applications.

[PaulHoule]

The bit that goes unsaid about Electron is... why?

If the goal is a legitimate app that has the lifecycle of an app that you start up and then shut down today the answer is "just write a web application" and then it "just works" on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Meta Quest, etc.

Mostly people get pissed about Electron because they have 15 Electron apps running in the tray burning up resources all the time and popping up stuff that covers the tray and other tray applications in those (very rare) cases that you want to interact with something in the tray.

It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem. That is, people use Electron specifically because they want to made rude applications which march all over your desktop in muddy boots: Electron is not a framework for writing well-behaved, polite, x-platform applications; you don't need that, you have the web! Electron is a framework for making rude applications that inhabit your tray, pop-up distracting notifications, etc.

[mschuster91]

> It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem.

The resource burn is an Electron problem. I member using HTML as "Active Desktop" in the Windows 98 era. You could drag an Internet Explorer widget into VB6 applications if you wanted (OLE, COM and ActiveX, damn that was an era of powerful technologies!). But it was one shared runtime across the OS which meant it did not have anywhere near close to the performance impact that even one Electron app has today.

[emodendroket]

Well, wanting to interact with the tray, plus access to native resources your browser can't access, I'd imagine.

[WarmWash]

People think they are upset about new technology, but what they are actually upset about is the general consensus being that the new technology has a better value prop.

[PunchyHamster]

Users don't have fucking choice in the matter.

[emodendroket]

I mean, not directly, but they demonstrate by not punishing heavy apps over and over again that they care much more about features.

[shimman]

Oh yeah I forgot the user is able to stop the force of will from trillion dollar corporations.

[emodendroket]

There are lots of examples of such corporations trying to sell a product people didn't want and losing their money.

[troupo]

And the irony is that the author of that talk spent that same decade busy shoving as much Javascript into browsers as possible. After all he's the originator and the main promoter of web components where every single thing including built-in browser functionality like form participation has to be done in Javascript.

Edit: There's not just one lost decade of the web. There's the browser wars and IE stagnant dominance. There's the 2010s with millions of man hours spent on web components and starving other directions of resources or actively hindering them (e.g. scoped css was continuously postoponed because it's highly incompatible with Shadow DOM) while pushing everything into Javascript (and partly breaking JS e.g. with the bolted-on class-based OOP).

It remains to see if Google's complete dominance breaks the web further

[overgard]

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

Why is that straightforward? As an example, right now every year on Steam there are thousands of games released. A lot of them are just shovel ware that nobody ever plays, but it does end up hiding actual quality stuff in the noise. Same thing happens in app stores. Gatekeeping that limits opportunity is bad. But gatekeeping around quality is very good. Wanting your software to be written by someone who cares about software and has expertise is, to me, more straightforwardly good.

Right now people are blaming vibecoding for decline in a lot of mature software products, whether that's fair or not (I think it's frequently unfair). I think there's a possibility that's going to morph into "AI First" companies being seen as poor quality brands. Already we see in games that when listed they have to disclose if AI was used or not, and if it was, it damages the credibility quite a bit.

[t-writescode]

While I strongly agree that heavy LLM usage in industries that actually collect customer data, or make important decisions is INCREDIBLY harmful (with quite a bit of unfortunate regularity), democratizing coding “for all” especially in small, narrow niches, is similar to democratizing art, singing, music, general creating.

As long as it’s “for you” or “small time”, there really isn’t a problem at all.

The only real downside so far to LLMs (ignoring environmental concerns) is when they’re heavily used and left unrestrained to go play with financial data, healthcare data, PII, anything with real consequences when it breaks. If a person is using it to automate their life. If a father is using it to help their kid with accessibility issues speak. If an artist is using it to help them write code so they can make a game. These are all good things.

You might think it’s shovelware; but the creator of those things is now super excited that their vision was made or their niche issue was helped, when no one else would.

[overgard]

I have no issue with people creating things, but if you're going to ask strangers to look at it, I think it's reasonable that there's a bar to clear. I think the bar should be adjusted based on the influx of stuff. Right now there's too much stuff that isn't good, and it drowns out the good stuff. There are plenty of places where people can publish amateur works for their friends to see.

[sdevonoes]

Most of software engineering is accidental complexity. Sharding, buffering, caching, load balancing, contention, async, functions, classes, recursion…

Big corporations behind LLMs are taking it all.

[dannyw]

There's a huge difference between everything you mentioned, and dealing with 'browser quirks' like:

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <!--[if IE 8]> <html lang="en" class="ie8 no-js"> <![endif]-->
  <!--[if IE 9]> <html lang="en" class="ie9 no-js"> <![endif]-->
  <!--[if !IE]><!-->
  <html lang="en" class="no-js">
  <!--<![endif]-->

The points the author made simply aren't good arguments. Yes, frontend development was harder during those days, but not harder in a good or rewarding way.

[sevenzero]

Sharding, buffering, caching, load balancing are mostly issues 99% of devs will never have to work on. It gets relevant on high load pages, but most stuff out there wont ever need it.

[layer8]

That’s not what accidental complexity means. Accidental complexity comes from design errors that could have in hindsight been avoided, meaning that if those errors hadn’t been made (made by accident, literally), there wouldn’t be any accidental complexity. The items you list aren’t accidents that could be avoided, they are necessities in achieving relevant goals.

[mcmcmc]

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?

[SkyBelow]

Depends upon the filtering system.

Consider indie games. If there are 10 of them and 5 are great, you don't need any filter. You look through 5 great and 5 not so great games and end up with 5 great ones.

Now go to a world where indie games explode. But only 1 in every 100 are great. There are now 100,000 games, but most qualify as very low quality. There are now 1,000 great games (and a few of these might be the perfect game you dreamt of), but if you don't have a filter and are buried under 10s of thousands of horrible games, things feel worse.

With a filter, you now live in a world where you can easily find most of those great games with only a few lower quality ones showing up. So as long as the filters that exist, whatever they might be, can handle it, more is better even if quality drops.

Unless the quality extremely fast, say my previous example of 100,000 games but only 1 in a million was a great game. I think this level of quality drop is extremely unlikely. Instead, I suspect the real problem is if the filters can keep up, because they depend upon human effort, so it is possible to hit a point where they are overwhelmed and stop functioning properly. That's when things get worse. As long as the filters hold, more building leads to better outcomes even with a drop in quality.

[wiseowise]

> I think this level of quality drop is extremely unlikely.

Just open Steam, PSStore, Nintendo store.

[wiseowise]

Infinite monkeys with typewrites theory. Except typewriters are $20/$200 Claude code subscriptions.

[emodendroket]

Suppose the choice is between software that does what you want, but isn't very optimized, and the software not existing at all, rather than between shoddy and beautiful software that both do what you want, and maybe it will make more sense to you.

[acedTrex]

I will pick the software not existing at all every time. Easily without a thought.

[emodendroket]

I think that's an absurd thing to believe, but if we've moved beyond "I don't understand" to "I don't agree" then my post served its purpose.

[acedTrex]

I'm not following what "I dont understand" would entail here. The choice is fairly binary.

[emodendroket]

Then ask the guy I was replying to and not me.

[mcmcmc]

So apply a false dichotomy and it will all make sense? Still not buying it. Not everything needs to be solved with software, and brushing off negative externalities as “not very optimized” is irresponsible

[emodendroket]

It's not a false dichotomy at all. There wasn't a lot of junk clothing in the ancient world -- everything was made to last. The downside was it was very expensive and most people didn't have much. The episode with the guards casting lots to see who can have Jesus's robes in the gospels is rather difficult to understand for a modern audience.

[wiseowise]

> and maybe it will make more sense to you

Still doesn't.

[emodendroket]

Well, I can lead a horse to water but not make it drink.

[wiseowise]

Give it an LLM, maybe it can write a half-assed app that can help it drink.

[HDThoreaun]

People can choose not to consume things that are straight garbage.

[bigstrat2003]

They can, in theory. But when the signal to noise ratio gets too low, it becomes prohibitively difficult to filter out the garbage. Thus I don't think it's true that more people creating things is a pure benefit. It may not even prove to be a benefit at all, on net.

[HDThoreaun]

That's what critics are for. In our decentralized media environment it is not difficult to find critics for whatever youre interested in

[Jensson]

Critics has the same issue, they will also be mostly AI generated. How do you find the good non-AI generated and unpaid critics in the future?

[HDThoreaun]

Same as it’s always been. Test the waters until you find someone with a consistent preference that lines up with your own. Personally I don’t really care if a critic is ai as long as its preferences are consistent and align with my own. If you dont find yourself relating to a critics take the great thing is that it’s easy to switch.

[sershe]

So I used to hand code async http request based UIs when this feature first appeared, write cross browser css, etc. before moving to work on distributed systems backend. These days I think a blanket ban on browser scripting would be a lesser evil.

There are, roughly, 3 tiers of developers with regard to any such labor saving tech (js libraries etc.)

People who could do a good job low level and can do it faster with libraries. People who couldn't, or couldn't be bothered, before the libraries, but can now accomplish things. That is the good part. And then there are the unwashed masses, who couldn't dream of accomplishing anything on low level but now can, and who at least in case of JavaScript far outnumber the previous category. Like when I messaged a webmaster whose side would download an uncached 3mb script blob on every page load (it was their script, not ads), to render few paragraphs of text, and they responded that it was by design and the script couldn't be cashed because some variables in it changed based on time, and that is so large because it contains features necessary for other pages that have more than text. I think we'd all be better served if these people pursued a more appropriate career, for example in the roadside trash pickup.

It remains to be seen how it goes with llms, but personally I'm not optimistic.

[ozim]

Not only deeply inconvenient but also a lot of times actually making more things worse.

OP writes about doing stuff ”properly” and how “using frameworks” was somehow worse.

Having a framework that is built by actual experts is much better than every “self proclaimed expert” building his own crooked thing.

Being able to switch developers between projects easily is also good for developers. I can switch companies on a whim without having to learn “crooked way of self proclaimed specialists”.

[gobdovan]

It doesn't seem to me that the author is saying 'AI bad, abstraction bad, knowing browser quirks GOOD'. Looks to me like someone making a specific claim about a trend where having an easier time getting off the ground can lead to a lower ceiling.

I'd read it kind of like 'The man and the butterfly' story. Or the Kant passage about how doves might wish air didn't exist, without realising that friction is exactly what permits them to fly.

[afavour]

> this is largely accidental complexity.

Less of an accident than a byproduct of the unique ecosystem the web lives in (which is a positive!) Compare to say, backend development. If I said database indexes are deeply inconvenient and that I shouldn't have to make them I'd get laughed out of the room and justifiably so. But by comparison when a developer says "I don't care to learn CSS" folks nod their heads in agreement.

[Forgeties79]

Yesterday we saw on the frontpage that LLM’s can’t even accurately assess if California produces literally all the almonds in the world.

The really weird gaps and inconsistencies just make it to untrustworthy. I spend so much time vetting all the outputs that it often cancels out the time it saves me, and I find enough errors that I don’t have an incentive to streamline things/not vet it.

[smackeyacky]

Exactly. Nobody wants smalltalk programmers or IIS whisperers. You just have to embrace the idea that your skills become worthless every five years and move on.

[danielvaughn]

That's all true - I taught myself how to code from 2009-2012 so I remember what it was like. However, around that time there was also deep focus on architecture, an obsessive focus on rendering performance and page weight. Everyone could recite the loading sequence that HTML pages used, we knew how many requests could be downloaded in parallel, how to best bundle assets for the fastest time to render, etc. So it was a mix of both pain and frustration on one hand, and a pride in one's work on the other hand.

Both have been lost; good riddance the former, but I miss the latter.

[ifwinterco]

I disagree that what makes front end hard is mostly accidental complexity.

Some of it is for sure (CSS, while I actually quite like it, isn't perfect).

However it's fundamentally harder to get the basics right in front end than back end because:

- You don't control the environment (meaning "browser quirks" are actually inevitable to some extent)

- You don't control the screen size and resolution of the device (meaning responsive design is not accidental complexity, it's inherently a somewhat complicated thing you have to address)

- Internal state is often visible to users (an API can be a complete mess internally as long as it returns the correct JSON in a reasonable time. Not so with frontend)

Compare that to backend where you control everything except any external APIs you need to use, it's chalk and cheese.

The reason the market doesn't value front end skills isn't because they aren't difficult or valuable - a really slick front end is worth its weight in gold.

The reason is it's almost impossible to tell in a 1h interview if someone is actually good at front end or not, relative to back end coding tasks which are more deterministic

[raincole]

I fully agree. The reason that LLMs seemingly defy No Silver Bullet is that the premise of that theory is flawed. Software development has been mostly accidental complexity, not essential complexity. Actually I believe even with LLMs' help, the accidental part still takes the lion's share of the total complexity.

[skydhash]

Not really. The issue is that inexperienced people, while trying to solve the essential complexity, are creating so much accidental complexity that soon the project either collapses or oscillates between bugs. LLM is just the highway to reach that state sooner.

[sevenzero]

>...and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

It depends. My country (Germany) introduced accessibility laws recently which enforces you to build everything public with accessibility in mind. If a page doesn't meet the expected standard you can get extremely high fines.

[carlosjobim]

That makes a lot of sense! I suppose that BMW has been fined billions for making motorcycles that blind people can't drive safely?

[sevenzero]

Sir this post is about front end development/products.

[wiseowise]

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

Is it? More than a decade ago there was a Cambrian explosion of software, Flash alone was the defining force of indie gaming industry. And now what? We have so much shit/shovelware that nobody wants to touch with a ten-foot pole.

[acedTrex]

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

No it's not, its the opposite actually its very bad and leads to far far more noise in the system to sort through to find value as someone who's competent.

[sublinear]

> that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make

The users are also entitled to hate your website or app. At what point do you admit you're just making excuses for cheap and sloppy work?

[machiaweliczny]

Yes it's still bad there's no viable headless UI in browser one can really style and it has all the a11y etc. but need extra library for selects that work etc. Invented work for no good reason. The real complexity is in diversity of devices though nowadays in the frontend.

[moron4hire]

Making UI less accessible is specifically not a trade off people are entitled to make. Accessibility is a legal requirement. This is like arguing it's ok to use robot construction workers who forget to install wheel chair ramps because "gotta go fast".

[Zababa]

It really depends, up until recently (January) reading all the Temporal doc and doing the courses allowed me to frequently suggest to the current frontier model things they didn't remember. I don't know if this changed recently.

[madrox]

I tend to agree. I believe most of these arguments, whether consciously or not, are rooted in sour grapes.

If AI were already the norm, and someone came along and said, "hey! I've got a great idea! Instead of AI building all this stuff, what if we did it by hand?" and talk about all these amazing benefits to hand crafting code, people would largely say no thanks.

As far as the abstraction argument goes, well, we've been creating higher order abstractions for a long time and called it good. I don't see why we should suddenly be against abstraction.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's an argument from assumption. The issue isn't whether AI is "building all this stuff" but how well it's doing it, how well the people using it are doing it, how expensive it really is, and whether there are observable objective benefits at the end - not just a subjective sense that some work is taking less time.

The reality is probably bimodal. The people who are benefiting are benefiting a lot, but they're likely in a minority. The majority will be tokenmaxxing at great expense and spinning their wheels in real terms.

But there's no hard research to prove that.

Considering the huge sums involved, the absence is interesting.

[madrox]

Calling that an argument from assumption is fair. I am basing this on where I think the puck is going, but I don't think I'm wrong. The issues you mention are not unsolvable problems, and AI is very good at independently iterating and improving on an observable objective metric.

Reality is certainly bimodal today, but that's because as an industry we're lagging behind capability. We're in the early days of the innovator's dilemma S-curve.

[overfeed]

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

Only because you've not invested time[1] to learn a11y, but that is par for the course: LLMs are pretty good at impressing people without a deeper understanding of a field with its statistically average outputs.

My hot-take: one shouldn't oversee an LLM task whose output they are unable to evaluate.

1. And you don't have to! We have limited time, accessibility is broad, there are numerous standards, and screen readers can be unergonomic, to put it lightly. But a human has common sense, and can care. I doubt there's enough a11y training data to match a caring human testing and thinking through interactions. Sadly, human software QA is now threatened with extinction.

[BrenBarn]

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

It most definitely is not.

[Aurornis]

> the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people

This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

LLMs feel threatening to anyone who had an edge by knowing how to navigate domains with a lot of weird and complex behavior. It’s nice to feel like businesses need you if they want to solve a problem. It’s scary when a cheaper solution arrives that does 70% of that deep knowledge navigation at 1% of the cost.

[dosisking]

And LLMs remind me of the video game Lemmings.

Also reminds me of that episode of Star Trek TOS 'The Ultimate Computer'

And the STTNG episode 'The Game'

Einstein was correct, the only thing in the universe that is infinite is human stupidity.

That is why I feel threatened by LLMs.

[Filligree]

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

To make the obvious counterargument, “then you shouldn’t be creating websites at all”.

I don’t actually believe this, but I know people who do. Some would add “shouldn’t be allowed to”.

[bakugo]

I wonder what went so wrong that "if you don't understand [thing] you shouldn't be building [thing]" is now considered a controversial statement.

[mathgeek]

If you're building bridges, this shouldn't be a controversial statement. Same if you're building cryptography software.

It's debatable if the same should apply to the vast majority of software that is less critical.

[BizarroLand]

It has always been a controversial statement.

How are you supposed to learn without doing? Who sets the bar for when you have achieved understanding?

And finally, in specific instances of creating front ends that are inclusive for users, I would argue that being willing to receive feedback and improve is vastly more important than getting it right on the first try.

[fwip]

Well, there's degrees of understanding, as well as degrees of seriousness of the project. You can also learn a lot by building something.

Some people are writing the Netflix homepage (where an outage costs millions of dollars), and some people are writing a blog for three readers.

[kristianc]

That's not what I said, I said I likely understand it less than a 635B parameter LLM, and that using the LLM as a shortcut to that knowledge is something I'd consider perfectly acceptable. I might even become better at it through using the LLM.

[layer8]

You need a certain understanding to be able to judge whether the output is adequate. I think the argument is against people who lack that understanding.

[Filligree]

Keep in mind these are two different things. Not all websites need to be accessible.

[cyanydeez]

being able to increase both a11y and i18n even if imperfect are definitely a LLM value add; the problem is simply business. This doesn't make the heat->cash register bling.

[classified]

Each time you say that an LLM "understands" something better than you do, you also say that you're not actually qualified to judge the LLM's understanding.