[Retr0id]

Agreed. It's not that the designs it produces are bad necessarily, they're just very same-y. People often talk about the bootstrap era, but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole).

[sublinear]

The comparison is pretty accurate though. The moment anyone dared to stray from the bootstrap defaults is when the whole thing would go to shit.

Every steaming pile said less about the development effort and so much more about the project management. This same boneheaded top-down approach is why AI isn't working for anyone without being willing to pour as much effort into babysitting as just writing the damn code yourself.

Old adages continue to ring true and as loud as ever. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

[re-thc]

> but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole)

They were, at least for that era. Just maybe not at AI-scale.

[PaulHoule]

Like you had to know a little HTML in the bootstrap era. I made what I thought was a pretty nifty landing page but I got endless complaints because “it looked like bootstrap”