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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

I am very bad at frontend and I know frontend peeps keep saying claude/llms are bad at it, but now, for the first time in my 40 year career, I deliver frontend that are looking better and functioning better than whatever I see in hip products people 'designed with love in blah'. And our clients agree. If the css is correct or not, I don't know as I never really found the energy to learn it and now I don't need to and can focus on the business logic. The endresults look and work phenomenal: not sure why I would care if the css is the best. Especially nice when I have been using something for a long time and some things I always found lacking: now I add them in in minutes: auto completion here, move creation inline there, add drag and drop: ah but on mobile make it like that. Everything just works and in hours vs days or weeks it was before.

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I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is.

I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a fire breaks out.

I get it - the hype is based around the quick gains you can absolutely have. The gains are insane, I have been able to be more productive at boilerplate and repetitive tasks too. But just building software isn't hard. Building software that lasts, building software that is rock solid, efficient and maintainable, that's hard!

It's sickening to me how quickly people want to throw that in the garbage. All because it saves a few $ in development time, quality is suddenly a metric that is completely ignored, rather than weighed in.

It's going to bite people in the ass.

Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years).

I agree with you we should have quality standard, but I also think it's 100% inevitable that this will all go out the window, in most companies and if that happens, our asses will be bitten.

Design/layout/ux have value (and I don't think you're saying they don't!) - when it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing, the result is perceivably better than when it's done by somebody like me who learned HTML for her myspace blog. Stuff like accessibility, "responsive design," theming, and stuff I probably haven't even heard of, all make websites easier and more intuitive to use.

As a silly example, an LLM will happily add all sorts of animated gifs to the screen for me, even if it makes the page take three times as long to load and more difficult to use.

It's a shame to lose well-crafted experiences in favor of the lowest-common-denominator that LLMs put out, just because they're cheaper.

I guess the main takeaway is that you don’t care about the quality of the generated code. The end result is all that matters.

If I ask it to “add drag & drop”, I already know in my mind what the correct code should look like, because I’ve implemented it many times in the past. LLMs just never deliver the -code- that I want. The end result might look ok and the drag & drop will work, but the code will be atrocious and on first glance I can pick out 10-20 mistakes that I’ll have to ask it to fix. And even if I ask for a fix, I’ll never get the same code quality as hand written code. And how can I push this kind of sub-par code to an employer’s repo when I know that I can (and should) write better quality code myself. This is what I’m being paid for right?

> This is what I’m being paid for right?

That's a good question. Because developers can sometimes have a bit of an unhealthy love affair with their own code.

Does your employee actually care as much about code quality as much as you do?

They would probably ask what is the downside of accepting this lower quality code, given the upside you presented:

> The end result might look ok and the drag & drop will work

Which you did quickly, saving them money (in theory).

Well said.

No, you’re being paid to deliver the product to the _company’s_ chosen standards, not yours. And in my experience, fast and cheap and cheerful is often exactly what they want. They’ll have changed their minds next week and want it all ripped out for something else anyway.

Exactly. _So much_ software dev is "throwaway" in my experience. Of course some isn't. Landing pages, A/B tests, even a lot of feature work is very speculative and gets put in the trash.

I do wonder if this is why there is such a gulf in LLM experience. If you're doing hardcore huge scale distributed systems then I can (maybe?) see why you'd think it is useless. However, that is very niche imo and most software dev work is some level (unfortunately) of virtually throwaway code. Of course, not all is - of all the ideas and experiments, some percentage is hopefully very successful and can be polished.

Indeed. And you get some engineers who only want to code perfect bespoke code all the time and sometimes that’s useful and sometimes it’s not. It depends on the requirements of the client, just as it would in any other trade. We need to be flexible to both the clients time and money budget, and also make code that suits the criticality of the task at hand. If you can’t lower your standards to fit a use case, I think it’s actually a bad thing.

Are you implementing designs that were given to you or having AI generate the design as well? I could see it being better at the latter.

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