Does anyone remember the websites that front page and dreamweaver used to generate from its wysiwyg editor? It was a nightmare to modify manually and convinced me to never rely on generated code.

I agree that the code that dreamweaver generated was truely awful. But compilers and interpreters also generate code, and these days they are very good at it. Technically the browser’s rendering engine is a code generator as well, so if you’re hand-coding HTML you’re still relying on code generation.

Declarative languages and AI go hand in hand. SQL was intended to be a ‘natural’ language that the query engine (an old-school AI) would use to write code.

Writing natural language prompts to produce code is not that different, but we’re using “stochastic” AI, and stochastic means random, which means mistakes and other non-ideal outputs.

I definitely remember that. Got paid $400 for my very first site in the early 00s.

But we also didn't have an AI tool to do the modifying of that bad code. We just had our own limited-capacity-brain, mistake-making, relatively slow-typing selves to depend on.

I still remember that Frontpage exploit in which a simple google search would return websites that still had the default Frontpage password and thus you could login and modify the webpage.

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