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.

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latchkey 6 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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toyg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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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latchkey 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Context is important in a response like this. Giacomo is a Sr. Presales consultant at a SaaS company that sells "The AI operating system for modern Finance." Of course you're adverse to things because it is a direct threat to what your business offers today.

If I can vibe code up a solution that fixes my problems for $200, it doesn't matter what happens in 5 years. The rate of change that's happening today in the increase in quality of the output of the models, I can just tell it to fix whatever we have and make it better.

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toyg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Spoken with the true arrogance of someone who has no idea about the real world of finance.

When your software has to produce legal documents, satisfy auditors, and certify a bunch of things to shareholders and governments, I'm sorry but your $200 vibecoded hack is not going to cut it. You will have to get it certified, to get it audited, to get it secured according to this and that legislation, to prove where it gets each and every number and how it modifies it, and then you will have to maintain it because standards and laws change every other day. Sure, get an agent to cook you up a full consolidation solution, see how quickly you get laughed out of the room by grown-ups.

Btw, I am not "adversed to things" - the stuff we do has agents built-in, that do all sorts of wonderful things. The difference is that we can demonstrate that they do them right, with financial intelligence standardized and battle-tested across thousands of customers all over the world. Our customers don't have to worry about rewriting their pile of vibed hacks, or about being humiliated by auditors, because we take care of all that stuff for them. That's worth more than the pennies you save by having cousin' Vinnie vibe up a multidimensional financial engine that takes 3 days to calculate trillions of useless intersections before falling over.

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latchkey 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You sound like someone who was adversed to cell phone cameras taking over film.

Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam.

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thelastgallon an hour ago | parent [-]

> Get ready. AI is coming for every single industry, full steam.

It is, indeed. The C-Suites at every company are making plans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmU9uovmT2A

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latchkey an hour ago | parent [-]

Hilarious!

But more real... Giacomo fails to take into account the concept of when OpenAI decides to create an audited financial service that guarantees that their output is valid. ChatGPT Work is already a beginning of that future.

	▲	toyg 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's like saying Google offering GMail ended webmail - there are still plenty of webmail services around: some better, some worse, some more specialised. The same will be true of most sectors. AI is another tool in the toolbox, not magic. It's not about being pro or against it, it's here already (hey, we sell it!) and obviously it will continue to get better; but it won't magically solve everything for $2.