Comment by lifetimerubyist
3 days ago
When stuff was getting too complicated, I looked for ways to make things simpler.
Developers have spent decades trying to figure out ways to make things simpler, less code the better, only to throw it all out the window because chatbot go brrrrrr.
In a very real sense, developers efforts to make web development simpler have clearly failed. This is true regardless of the existence of LLMs and/or your opinion of their utility.
They have been very successful. After we got a hit from security requirements and broke the Microsoft monopoly on browsers, web development have only got more and more potentially simple.
If you or some other person don't program in the way that makes it simple, it's not our communitary problem. What matters is that the potential is there.
I think that you are confusing browser engine maturity and developer ecosystem, which means that you're having your own conversation.
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It’s because business demand speed and shipping over other concerns.
We had to fight hard for proper quality controls in the face of the LLM coding assistance boom where I work. These are great tools but they have limits and can lead to poor engineering hygiene quite quickly.
It took a major issue being attributed to having too much trust in these tools before we were able to enforce better hygiene with them
Yeah. I love programming. I even love the business side where you solve real problems for people.
What I don't love is the constant pressure to just deliver faster and faster. So forcing these chatbots on us fill a need for the CEOs and manager types that just want to DELIVER DELIVER DELIVER, but the benefit for the people that are forced to use them are marginal at best. There are some valid use cases for LLM-based tools, but businesses mostly aren't interested in those because it doesn't make line go up. Streamlining operations? Nah. Shove a Chatbot where it doesn't belong so you can try to get a billion dollar investment? NOW WE ARE COOKING
C-suites and managers don't give a shit about quality unless they feel the pain. That's the most important thing I've learned. If you can find a way to push the pain up to the people that make the decisions, the more likely they are incentivised to improve it. It doesn't matter if you see a problem that takes 2 days to fix coming a year away - they do not care until the application crashes because of it.
Office politics sucks.
Customers don't buy software based on quality first, they buy on features.
Until customers in mass, or regulations demand quality, money will be made on deliveries.
If your lucky and can program how you want and take the time you need, then you can focus on the attributes you feel best about.
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please, developers are making terrible slop way before AI, look at the javascript infested frameworks in use on the web. they make NO sense. they are not making things simpler
And now you can generate javascript infested slop frameworks for $5 per million tokens. Such an improvement.
And it's so easy to just ask Claude to make one for you, why even bother standardizing anything when you can just use bespoke slop for anything anymore.
Libraries and frameworks? Not needed. Just shove everything into CC/Codex and let it figure it out.
The financial incentives of the Chatbots are always going to push people towards increased complexity, as well. The tendency will be for frameworks to become more complex, which will lead to increased LLM use, which will increase complexity.
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That actually might be an improvement over the JS frameworks...
Yes, so what? That's what I basically do, i need a little framework with this and that and API, 15 minutes later I get exactly what I need and want. Not more, not less.as long as it's not Auth, crypto or something like that, I don't see an issue.