Comment by zx8080
4 hours ago
> probably 20+ percent of code written on my team is by an LLM. it's great for frontends
Frontend has always been shitshow since JS dynamic web UIs invented. With it and CSS no one cares what runs page and how many Mb it takes to show one button.
But regarding the backend, the vibecoding still rare, and we are still lucky it is like that, and there was no train crush because of it. Yet.
Backend has always been easier than frontend. AI has made backend absolutely trivial, the code only has to work on one type of machine in one environment. If you think it's rare or will remain rare you're just not being exposed to it, because it's on the backend.
Might be a surprise to you, but some backends are more than just a Nextjs endpoint that calls a database.
I think you’re onto something. Frontend tends to not actually solve problems, rather it’s mostly hiding and showing parts of a page. Sometimes frontend makes something possible that wasn’t possible before, and sometimes the frontend is the product, but usually the frontend is an optimization that makes something more efficient, and the problem is being solved on the backend.
It’s been interesting to observe when people rave about AI or want to show you the thing they built, to stop and notice what’s at stake. I’m finding more and more, the more manic someone comes across about AI, the lower the stakes of whatever they made.
Spoken like someone deeply unfamiliar with the problem domain since like 2005, sorry. It's an entirely different class of problems on the front end, most of them dealing with making users happy and comfortable, which is much more challenging than any of the rote byte pushing happening on the backend nowadays.