[lqet]

This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS skills and demanded Ruby on Rails and Django and Spring and GWT, later Angular skills.

It really feels strangely familiar to me: you could get very far very quickly without any real deeper knowledge and have a working web application within a few minutes. It felt like magic. Then you could customize it within the framework by skimming documentation and googling around until... you couldn't, because you had no clue how any of this really worked internally. And just like with vibe-coded web apps, you could recognize the standard framework web app that was patched together in an afternoon from a mile away, but it very much impressed managers.

Amusingly, I sometimes find that developers talk about their go-to frontier model in the same way that GUI developers talked about their favorite web framework ~15-20 years ago. Personification of the tool, even identification with it, frustration that things that worked with version X got worse with version X.1, "I am developing things 10x faster now", "I am going back to writing XYZ by hand", etc.

[sevenzero]

On the other hand, using frameworks later on was a good attempt to standardize things. Having some homegrown GUI nobody knows how to work with isn't an advantage either. Personally I refuse things that "feel" too big (Nuxt/Next), but like Vue... Currently though, I want to get rid of most Javascript so I'll work my way to HTMX or Alpine type solutions with server side templates. Personally the less tech I use the better, there was a time where you had all kinds of bullshit in a web app prior to even adding a single line of custom code.

[renegade-otter]

+1 for HTMX+ Alpine.

Ironically, this goes well with LLMs, where you can nail down the patterns and then the clanker can follow them. There is nothing wrong with using clankers for fast typing.

[johsole]

+1 for htmx + Django, really my favorite stack for development.

[culebron21]

I must say that already in the early 2000s web developers were tired of hand-coding everything, and many sought some sort of automation -- a framework, a CMS. Already in 2004 I made a site with barebone approach -- put a txt in a diretory tree and let PHP simply add tags instead of linebreaks and insert it into HTML. The alternative those days was a heavy content management systems. And I came to Django after two awful PHP frameworks, written by lead developers at the workplaces. So, frameworks like Django were a more gradual transition, and they were much more pleasant to work with.

Sure, as you pushed it further, like add versioning to objects, things got very tricky and not guaranteed to work, and no way to fix.

But otherwise, yes, the attitudes look similar.