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.

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peteforde 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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marcosdumay 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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peteforde 4 days ago | parent [-]

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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marcosdumay 4 days ago | parent [-]

You pick the ecosystem you'll use, the only one forced on you is the browser. If you decide to use one that makes your life harder, that's again not a communitary problem.

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bonesss 4 days ago | parent [-]

There’s also change over time to consider: web programming has become immensely more stable and simpler and more mature over time, thereby enabling classes of application and experience that traditionally meant a client application to be built on the web, hence modern web app development becoming a complex and complicated morass.

Facebook and others have delivered a bunch of cross platform shizz that really should be baked into the desktop and mobile OS itself, moving complexity up the stack. Microsoft Office uses React, to highlight the issue. We’ve spent decades chasing the basics of fat client development and doing it in JavaScript.

	▲	peteforde 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's freaking wild that the folks suggesting web development has gotten simpler are also talking about baking React "into the stack" with a straight face. I don't know what planet y'all are living on, but React is most emblematic of the layers upon layers of BS that people have to deal with today that simply were not an issue 20 years ago.

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no_wizard 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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lifetimerubyist 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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pixl97 4 days ago | parent [-]

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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lifetimerubyist 4 days ago | parent [-]

If you have customers that will put up with things being slow as molasses and crashing al the time, well….can you send some my way because mine won’t STFU about it.

	▲	pixl97 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You've made a categorical mistake here... I stated customers don't buy software based on performance. They just bitch about the performance of the flashy software they buy... Then get tired of it, and move on to some other flashy software with suck performance never learning their lesson.

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8697656846548 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

	▲	lifetimerubyist 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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kome 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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lifetimerubyist 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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sroerick 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	lifetimerubyist 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		We need better chatbots to fix the bugs from the current chatbots that fixed the bugs from the previous chatbots when they fixed the bugs from the previous generation of chatbots that….. Just give Sam Altman more and more of your money and he’ll make a more advanced chatbot to fix the chatbot he sold you that broke everything. You don’t even need to own a computer, just install an app on your phone to do it all. It doesn’t matter that regular people have been completely priced out of personal computing when GPT is just gonna do all the computing anymore anyway. Clearly a sustainable way forward for the industry.

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cpursley 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That actually might be an improvement over the JS frameworks...

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Bombthecat 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.