The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions.

Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is web standards and conventions. The fact that it works at all and is merely a little leaky is an accomplishment in itself.

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berkes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> a common-sense mental model for web development.

You are contradicting yourself. Either its a "minefield...of edge cases..." Or it's a common-sense model. Not both.

I'm convinced we're still in this minefield of edge cases, not in a situation where we've solved all this, and where the tech to build "frontend" is clean, predictable, free of historical baggage etc etc etc.

All we have done, is plaster over these foundational mistakes and invcompatibilities. We haven't solved them. React doesn't solve the fact HTML was never designed to be a UI toolkit. Next.js doesn't solve the fact that JavaScript is full of design mistakes that prohibit it from ever becoming a safe, sane, reasonable (literally) language. Tailwind doesn't solve the problem of CSS being haphazardly introduced to style a markup which was never designed to be styled. Etc.

All LLMs now do, is having the "knowledge" of the horrors under the plaster, in a statistical model that was trained on examples from an era where 99% of the examples are hardly more than plastering to fix the ever reappearing cracks in the previous layers of plaster.

	▲	jeremyjh 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, they are saying that the frameworks and tools discussed in TFA have made it look coherent. For the most part we have not worried about compatibility for a decade. All abstractions leak a bit but in practice it holds up quite well, well worth the cost savings and flexibility for many apps.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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ActionHank 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think your ignorance is showing.

There is far more to it than all that.

I've interviewed far too many nextjs experts who couldn't do anything else. That's not a skill, that's just knowledge, which at this point is freely available.

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jeremyjh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, they have no knowledge and yet they can get shit done that is good enough for many use cases. That is precisely the point.

	▲	wiseowise 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		All while working for peanuts. Win for everyone, except workers.

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kalcode an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That being entirely unfair. It is still a skill. They still learning stuff. It does not help them to be trapped in a bubble. But nothing is not transferrable. Things we learn, even if they are only a React can't write vanilla JS, it's still unfair to say they have no skill.

Just not a correct interpretation. Many skills start that way and even some people make a whole career mastering one thing and one thing only.

Not saying being trapped in React land unable to break out is good. But being able to create something, even if it's just with Nextjs is still a good thing.

We should hate on the businesses that force us to take shortcuts, value quantity over quality. They wanted boot camps with code monkeys.

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emodendroket 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's true and it also seems like the bundle of C, Unix conventions, and so on, is similar in a way, but older and so we're more used to it.