> I feel like I can manage the entire stack again - with confidence.

By not managing anything? Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

I understand it. I've found myself looking at new stacks and tech, not knowing what I didn't know, and wondering where to start. But if you skip these fundamentals of the modern dev cycle, what happens when the LLM fails?

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boca_honey 3 days ago | parent [-]

Then it fails and the world doesn't end. You fix it or delegate it and move on. Most people aren't working on code for power grids and fighter jets. There's room for failure. This same argument was used by the old timers when younger programmers couldn't code assembly or C on bare metal systems.

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oliwarner 3 days ago | parent [-]

In the context of "fun again", debugging slop, finding imaginary dependencies, and discovering unimaginably fragile code isn't fun, even if it's not important.

But past bad output, I worry for our creative fulfillment. The old timers are right. That feeling of accomplishment, a keystone of happiness is a product of work. Probably beyond the scope of the thread.

	▲	oliwarner 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		This isn't supposed to be a slam on LLMs. They're genuinely useful for automating a lot of menial things... It's just there's a point where we end up automating ourselves out of the equation, where we lose opportunity to learn, and earn personal fulfilment. Web dev is a soft target. It is very complex in parts, and what feels like a lot of menial boilerplate worth abstracting, but not understanding messy topics like CSS fundamentals, browser differences, form handling and accessibility means you don't know to ask your LLM for them. You have to know what you don't know before you can consciously tell an LLM to do it for you. LLMs will get better, but does that improve things or just relegated the human experience further and further away from accomplishment?