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Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

Web element feel similar to PHP or wordpress development in 2010.

There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work.

As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, especially front end, will be like knowing HTML and CSS in 2015. Like everyone should know it, and thus not even worth putting on your resume.

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Genuine question: why do you think LLMs will be able to handle frontend development in a way they won’t be able to handle backend development? I assume you’re talking about real companies, not toy projects or websites for restaurants or whatever.

Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not).

With backend I find they're good at the really high level (give me the options for architecture and their pros and cons) and doing something small and precise (gimme a function `List (Maybe a) -> List a`). The stuff in-between I have to handle myself.

> Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not).

This is my #1 complaint about how people talk about LLM productivity

If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it

LLMs are good enough to solve my problems with flexbox. I gave a LLM a small self-contained flexbox-puzzle which I couldn't solve, and it solved it. The CSS it produced did the thing I asked.

> If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it

Hard disagree: Even if you aren't good at writing a function like `List (Maybe a) -> List a`, you can easily say whether the LLM suggestion was good or not.

If you aren't good at playing the game of go and a program beats you giving you nine handicap stones, probably the program is good at it. Many similar examples.

I think the person above was alluding to the idea that the determination of whether or not LLMs are good at frontend development is the idea that frontend development is flexbox. That's like me saying "LLMs will replace all developers who work with databases because Claude was able to spit out a really complex SQL query."

> If you aren't good at playing the game of go and a program beats you giving you nine handicap stones, probably the program is good at it. Many similar examples

This doesn't follow at all, maybe you just really suck.

It is entirely possible that a game AI that you find impossible to beat is trivial to beat for almost anyone with more experience than you have

Yes, there are chess engines that can beat the best chess players

However, most people couldn't possibly tell the difference between playing against the best chess engine in the world or a novice difficulty chess AI, because most people suck at chess

"It is better than I am" is a terrible metric to use to judge when you suck at that thing

Developing, managing, and operating distributed systems infrastructure has way less training data available than webdev. And it doesn’t translate in to pithy interpreted language one-liners.

Frontend (IMHO) tends to be simpler than BE systems, because FE is literally a single device, and often a single git repo.

BE requires a lot more context around microservices, database, reverse-proxy, api-design, etc.

A signal that makes me correct is the number of BE vs FE at a big company.

lol I wish. The problem is not the inherent complexity but the accidental complexity. FE has a big chunk in the second. You won’t get your budget to rewrite three accidental complexity you find in the wild

The question isn't "is frontend simpler than backend?" (which I don't think is as simple as you make it out to be). The question is "can LLMs replace frontend developers?"

I think it's a bit like Squarespace. The lowest possible tiers of developers will be replaced. Anything complex enough to be beyond the scope of a hobbyist isn't able to be replaced with an LLM.

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