Comment by throwayay4929
13 hours ago
Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI
FrontPage, Dreamweaber and co seemed to fell into obscurity when HTML5 & CSS3 came up and from that point web development went much more complicated than that.
Granted, it seems it is easier now to give prompts to an LLM so it will spit things out than back then where you had to know the tool and fiddle with menus and thingies to sort of try to produce a result.
But the drawback seems to be the same for both - lots of unreliable and unoptimized code that will go live if you don't know what they're doing under the hood and can potentially cause issues in the future. Remember that all this tools do are sorts of interpolation. I've seen lately lots of "modern" websites with tons layers of !important in their CSS and who knows the monstrosities that they have with their JS.
Meanwhile I and all people like me still don't have a job because all of this and the alleged "thousands" I was getting for doing this things.
the thing you haven't come to terms with is that it is more important to ship than it is to worry about the issues in the future. i thought RoR taught everyone that.
the beauty of what's happening today is that AI might produce slop on the first try, but you can also refactor just as easily too. "clean up all !important and optimize the code for speed", is just as easy of a prompt and it'll go off and do a fantastic job at that. that is what the OP was talking about in his article.
you don't have a job because you're not adapting to this new world order quickly enough. i predict that there will be insane demand for porting existing applications off these over priced SASS contracts and building tailored products for businesses. as much as they are trying to convince people, you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model and can envision a better solution to the actual problem out of thin air.
i'm burning 500m+ tokens a day on a $200/mo subscription. it is creating 10000x more value for me. it is no longer how much you know HTML/CSS, it is how well you know how to get AI to do what you want it to do and the only way to develop that skill, is to do it.
> you don't need a $5m/yr salesforce / servicenow contract when you understand the business model
I'm sure many people will think that; and I'm also fairly confident that 5 years later they'll take their obscure, bug-ridden, vibecoded monstrosity that nobody really understands, throw it out, and get a salesforce contract. Technical debt doesn't disappear just because you have agents working for you; in fact, it is exploding right now, and I would bet good money that 2-3 years for now there will be a flourishing cottage industry of consultancies specialized in dealing with such monstrosities.
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no, those tools sucked in comparison to what ai is doing.
i just built a financial dashboard for my business. in realtime, i'm sucking in all the data from quickbooks, mercury, stripe, deel APIs and presenting it to myself, and my investors. it does all that sitting in cloudflare as a worker, for $5/month. took me a couple weeks of iteration, not a single line written.
from that i just told ai... "i'd like to get rid of quickbooks because yesterday it was down and i couldn't log into it. figure out what i'm using there and present me an interface that allows me to do whatever i'm doing in quickbooks, but with my existing data from stripe, deel and mercury."
it then dutifully went off and built me that app and now i'm running it in parallel and synchronized with quickbooks, until i feel that i can just turn that off. it is customized exactly to my business workflow and easily maintained with full unit tests. it costs me nothing but a $200/mo codex subscription and a few hours of work.