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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA.

If you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love.

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So you’re skipping any sort of a build pipeline? You’re not going to bundle, so no code minification? You’re going to skip tests? And everyone who uses these things just does them to “feel grown up” and not for any particular benefit or purpose beyond that?

No. My point is more nuanced than that. All of the things in the article have value to someone, but their value to you is defined in terms of how much better they make your product.

If you spend so much time on the cumulation of product-adjacent activities that you don't make a good product, then their cumulative value to you was negative.

But I do, personally, love a good build system. The value is extremely high and it only takes 10 minutes to set one up.

But then you’re just saying “you should spend time on things which are valuable”. Isn’t that obvious?

Not so sure these days tbh. People are trying to shove as much shiny tools as possible instead of sometimes writing 10 vanilla JS lines and proceed to next feature or project. Maybe it’s already exhausted, but left-pad, is-odd, is-even are still my examples for people.

You seem to be lumping left-pad together with unit tests and build tools like typescript, then saying they are all bad because left-pad is bad.

You can use esbuild to build your entire project with a single command. Node has a built in test runner. You only need the complexity because you're convinced you need it.

You are responding with a point different than the one I was replying to.

they are not.

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