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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Well, this seems like it could be useful for the times you just want a quick prototype mocked up and can't be bothered to code it, or when you're dealing with sites that don't need much in the way of dynamic functionality.

However, it also makes me think that:

A: Maybe developers (and software engineers in general) should stop thinking their own jobs are necessarily safe from automation, since something like this could be the first step to the field going the same way as lorry or taxi driving will in future.

B: That agencies might start seeing their basic web development work start drying up in the not too distant future.

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Some of the very first programs written for computers (assemblers and compilers) were so that programmers could automate their own jobs. Nearly every advance in system software since then - recursive functions, software libraries, virtual memory, high-level languages, garbage collection, lexical closures, object-oriented programming, constructors & destructors, smart pointers, version control, package managers - has involved automating progressively higher-level tasks so that programmers can focus on new stuff.

Dreamweaver and FrontPage have existed for over 20 years. The use-case listed here isn't all that useful - if you just want a quick prototype website built from a WYSIWYG graphical editor, there are already very good tools for that, starting with the above two and going through web services like SquareSpace, Wix, and Weebly. I found the discussion of his approach fascinating, though, because it could be applied to lots of other, unsolved problems. Imagine being able to publish a website by taking a photo of a poster using your smartphone.

as a web developer my perception is dreamweaver and frontpage are now no longer relevant. is this actually true or am I just biased because of my job?

Probably true, but it's because their market (small businesses who just want a basic HTML-only site) has been taken over by website builders like Wix, Weebly, Wordpress, and Squarespace. Agencies & professional web developers moved up-market to the customers who require dynamic app-like behavior, which Dreamweaver and Frontpage sucked at, while the bottom end of the market moved to the aforementioned hosted services that could also run the site for them, handle maintenance, and easily integrate add-ons like email/blogs/commenting/RSS/analytics/etc.

B. Yes.

A. No. Good developers can run up the abstraction chain to keep providing value at a higher level. Most good devs fundamental value prop isn’t “I can make something in HTML”.

If anything, this will mean that more people can do the redundant stuff faster.

As a frontend guy, I can’t wait for the day that a tool can generate presentational stuff.

I'd argue in part you're both right about A. Good devs (those can keep running up the abstraction chain) will always be useful. But the bar for what a "good dev" is keeps getting higher as we introduce more and more abstraction. The sheer amount of knowledge and understanding that the average dev needs in order to be productive AND understand what's going on enough under the hood (to the point where they're not doing stupid things constantly) keeps getting larger.

Think back to CS in the 70s - AFAIK, the majority of the field that was understood is now covered before an undergraduate gets to their upper division classes. We're now expected to understand things at a much higher level of abstraction, but we ALSO need to know how logic gates and machine code works in order to fully understand what we're doing.

The 'incubation period' to produce a good dev is going to keep growing. The ones that make it to full dev maturity are going to be more productive than ever before, but fewer people will make it there.

Sure, there is a divergence of skill sets...We're going to have "doctor" developers – people who carry an incredible breadth of knowledge and are paid accordingly.

Beside them will be "nurse" developers – people who are just as professional, but less learned in the full range of computer science ideas.

Though the abstract nature of the field often benefits from analogical representations, I think this one detracts. I don't see how our current hodgepodge list of role titles we've already borrowed from other fields (architect, developer, designer, scientist, ops, product manager, evangelist(?!), quality assurance, security specialist, chief information officer (not to mention wizards, code monkeys, Java baristas (aka the bespeckled missionaries (they don't C# for whatever reason) who walk through your neighborhood every once in a while to knock on doors with warm smiles hoping to share their beliefs on the one true Oracle and some bizarre philosophy of enterprise scale spiritual development involving complex and brittle structures and subservience to feudal and [frankly] regressive class structures that most favor a nepotistic inheritance procedure designed to chiefly empower their children and a small circle of similarly interested functionaries that seem hellbent on oppressing the rest of the system), unicorn jockeys, tech debt lawyers, and whatever you call that long-gone contractor who years ago thrust a bizarre moonscript backend into the core of your team's architecture like Excalibur waiting for an Arthur everyone hopes won't happen along because rock that asshole stuck the sword in happened to be the kingdom's cornerstone and even the slightest nudge will cause the whole system to precariously sway ...)) can be summarized with a doctor / nurse dichotomy.

Even if writing, practicing and administering software legally required a degree and license, I think this still detracts. Maybe useful once software powers organic, higher-order life forms, at which point I imagine our doctors and nurses will be entirely software driven anyway[0].

[0] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Hologra...

Your reply is dizzying. Glad my commment could help you get some angst out of your system!

Hopefully the sword will be more Excalibur and less Sword of Damocles.

^^ I have no idea what that means, but it seemed relevant. :)

What will the "nurse" developers do such that the "doctor" developers don't just write something to abstract away the nurses?

Everyone knows the doctor developers rarely show up, and the nurse developers end up doing all the work.

Doctor is a long-running process that requires a callback from nurse.

Whatever the "doctor" developers write to abstract away the nurses, it's still not going to be able to communicate with nontechnical managers. Or at least, once it can do that, the "doctor" developers will be obsolete soon anyway.

Until we have AGI that replaces all developers, someone will have to do the work of converting business requirements into LOB apps.

The level of the 'hood' rises too. Used to be that in-depth knowledge of assembler, register efficiency and compilers was considered a requirement.

> As a frontend guy, I can’t wait for the day that a tool can generate presentational stuff.

Qualified agreement from this sometimes front-end guy, but that's assuming the generated presentational stuff is of equal or higher quality as that of the other front-end devs.

Being the front-end guy who has to debug the auto-generated code that doesn't quite work in a corner case or two sounds potentially worse than the status quo.

For sure. I'm sure that autogen won't be on par with a human, just faster.

Squarespace is simultaneously worse than what _any-decent-designer_ would put together AND better than an average marketing website.

I agree with your response to A in the short term. In the long term, however, much like a mountain in a flood people can only scramble so high before they run out of oxygen, or run out of room.

To take your metaphor a bit too far, it’s fortunate that we have more than one mountain. ;)

Sure, the days in which the web guy was viewed as a special guru won’t last forever. But even with auto-generated mockups, we’re still a long way from computers taking over everything.

As the baseline of tooling gets raised, the baseline of expectation gets raised.

Programmers will use these tools the way we always have: To automate the simple work on the way to building a finished product that's more complex, and done more quickly, than would have been possible previously.

Some markets die, yes. It's no longer possible to make a business out of selling Unix clones for commodity hardware, like you still could in the 1980s. It's no longer possible to make a living just making static HTML websites, like you could in the 1990s.

Ultimately, what programmers trade in is a specific kind of problem-solving design sense. Not just solving this single problem as fast as we can, but creating a more general solution, which composes well and can be understood and changed later on. Once programs can do that... well, we'd better be willing to offer them citizenship and recognize their civil rights as thinking beings.

The top of this metaphorical mountain involves learning new APIs, frameworks, languages and programming paradigms. An AI that can do that will be a threat to everyone.

In regards to B:

Wouldn't the agencies most affected by this type to image-to-website tech already be affected by WYSIWYG operations, (squarespace, wix, wordpress, etc.)? I am curious how many agencies are developing simple html/css enough that this type of thing would dry up work.

As far as point A: I don't know if there will ever be a "final state" of web development. For every automation fix that is introduced to the web dev space, 10 new technologies are developed that provided an added layer of complexity.

I think the web is bit different from traditional jobs being taken over by automation in that (as far as we know) there isn't a hard limit on how far we can push web technology and use. If anything, the people who would be replaced by these automation services are (presumably) the ones who would be developing the automation systems and integration to begin with.

With regard to B, at least in the DC area it is all dried up and agencies are climbing the value chain in one or both directions:

- As a communications/marketing/PR agency who provides the website as a component of a larger campaign. Many of these folks are already using platforms like Wix, Squarespace, etc., or Wordpress with purchased templates.

- Doing more complex site development that requires a lot of IA work and institutional change management. For example: migrating ancient federal HTML websites (yes some still exist) to Drupal.

With the advent of standardized web component libraries, design frameworks, css grids, and website builders; the task of building a simple website feels more like assembling the pieces of a puzzle. It's hard to know how long innovations in web development will outpace automation / deep learning, but it's an interesting space to follow.

Personally, I think bespoke web application development will be a strong area of innovation for many years to come as browsers and devices continue to increase in power. I'm more worried about keeping up with the fast pace of change than the entire industry drying up.

> A: Maybe developers (and software engineers in general) should stop thinking their own jobs are necessarily safe from automation, since something like this could be the first step to the field going the same way as lorry or taxi driving will in future.

I've seen hundreds of products to automate this kind of tasks and all of them failed one by one. The simple answer is that if you would have a software which could replace code, it would have a learning curve as complex as learning to code ans so being then worthless to learn.

Agreed, but also feels like the very common mockup->developer handoff is inefficient, and in many cases should just start from a working prototype vs a drawing.

Drawing a website can be much harder than just coding it up, especially if lots of repetition is involved. This is a nice trick, but, given the fixed vocabulary, isn't really that useful to non coders (who could accomplish faster results with drag and drop under similar restrictions).

A: Developers jobs were never safe from automation, they are just likely the last ones to be fully automated.

Damn, it's almost like developers are going to need to learn to focus on using code to solve business problems, rather than just focusing on being able to write code and calling it a day. XD

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