[jillesvangurp]

We're in the software industry. The whole point of that industry is automating things that are very repetitive. Frontend projects are very repetitive. And now AI is doing that for us. Fantastic, fees up a lot of time to build more interesting things.

De-skilling for skills that just aren't that relevant anymore because we've solved the problem (with AI or otherwise) has been a constant in our industry ever since computers were invented.

Move on, learn new skills. And actually effective use of AI is a skill some people seem to be struggling with. Stuff still doesn't build itself. If you can prompt it right, you can get it done. But are you prompting right? Are the tools doing what you ask them to do? How do you know? Did you check? I seem to spend an awful lot of time prompting AIs. I'm definitely getting better at it. But it's still a full time job.

And I'm sure in a decade or so we'll look back on this as a very inefficient way to build software. The tools will get better. The AIs more autonomous, etc. Because if you spend a day doing repetitive things prompting the same things over and over again, somebody or something should probably automate that!

[J_Shelby_J]

The point of software is to encode human will into machine communicable state.

The entire complaint here is that automating this risks that was is encoded is not what you want.

[andrekandre]

  > The entire complaint here is that automating this risks that was is encoded is not what you want.

this is the biggest issue to me; even if its code-generation was one-shot "perfect" (and beautiful) every time, people are gonna be less and less sweating the details and start throwing more mud at the wall to see what sticks instead of trying to understand their customer

n=1 but i see this first hand all the time now, people dont even read the generated requirements/specs cause they are too long but it looks kinda ok so "lets have at it" smh

[taken2000]

Instead of giving up on frontend the new efficiency to AI should free resources push the frontend further, the same for backend. The world needs lots of more software than we currently can create.

[fuzzy2]

> Frontend projects are very repetitive.

I’m sorry, what? This is such a shit take, I don’t even know where to start. What’s repetitive about them? That all UIs contain buttons or what?

If this is something that people actually believe, I can understand why UX has went to shit and then got even worse since the 90s.

[threetonesun]

Frontend developer here, frontend projects are incredibly repetitive. It is still wild to me that a complete set of UI controls that you can customize isn't native to all browsers. I can't count how many sortable / filterable tables I've implemented. I would much rather 99% of web UIs I work on that are essentially a series of forms be automated away to work on much more interesting things.

[_el1s7]

Listen, frontend developer, there's this thing called "npm", you should look that up.

[gen2brain]

Recommended for people who like the horror genre.

[fg137]

You might be surprised to find out that there aren't that many "interesting things" to build.

[esalman]

This opinion should only come from a CS grad who is accustomed to building CRUD apps and allergic to any real world problem domain.

At my work in insurance solutions we're solving perabyte scale problems. We do not have a Rust developer in the team, but taught ourselves with the AI and now automating workflows which took days to under a minute now.

[fg137]

Completely missing the point.

If you look at the speed a company rolls out new products/features, it should be obvious that "interesting ideas" especially good ones are infrequent and rare.

No offense, "using Rust to address a performance problem" is by no means novel or interesting. That is just another person's CRUD.

[esalman]

Using Rust is actually the most boring part of the problem. It would be almost impossible to solve for anyone without certain level of domain expertise.

[NietTim]

That just means you lack creativity, exploring new ideas and building new interesting things is easier then ever, all you need is an idea.

[fg137]

Yeah, all you need is an idea.

Look at how Meta's "ideas" turn out.

VR and metaverse surely sound like interesting stuff. Right? Right???

[skydhash]

VR and virtual worlds have been explored for decades, both in fiction and in the real world. The issue has always been that the target market is small. I don't know how Meta does market study, but the conclusion was already foreseen.

But the realm of what you can do with a computer is huge and working on the web is a very small part of it. Some other interesting part (for me) are OS development, network communication, computer architecture, embedded hardware and programming languages.

[NietTim]

I am not Meta, neither are you, nor are we doing things on their level. You can just build small things for you and your friends that fits your specific usecase that other tools do not fit yet, it doesn't need to be a world changing idea.