Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a "backend" dev, so you could say that I am very very unfamiliar, have mostly-basic and high-level knowledge of frontend development. Getting this thing to spit out screens and components and adjust them as I see fit has got to be some sort of super-power and definitely 20x'd my frontend development for hobby projects. Previous to this, my team was giving me wild "1 week" estimates to code simple CRUD screens (plus 1 week for "api integration") and those estimates always smelled funny to me.

Now that I've seen what the AI/agents can do, those estimates definitely reek, and the frontend "senior" javascript dev's days are numbered. Especially for CRUD screens, which lets face it, make up most screens these days and should absolutely be churned out like in an assembly line instead of being delicate "hand crafted" precious works of art that allows 0.1x devs to waste our time because they are the only ones who supposedly know the ancient and arcane 'npm install, npm etc, npm angular component create" spells.

Look at the recent Tailwind team layoffs, they're definitely seeing the impact of this as are many team-leads and managers in most companies in our industry. Especially "javascript senior dev" heavy shops in the VC space, which many people are realizing they have an over-abundance of because those devs bullshitted entire teams and companies into thinking simple CRUD screens take weeks to develop. It was like a giant cartel, with them all padding and confirming the other "engineer's" estimates and essentially slow-devving their own screens to validate the ridiculous padding.

Your UIs are likely still ass. Pre-made websites/designs were always a thing, in fact, it's (at least to me) common to just copy the design of another place as "inspiration". When you have 0 knowledge of design everything looks the greatest, it's something you kind of have to get a feel for.

Frontend engineers do more than just churning out code. Still have to do proper tests using Cypress/Playwright, deal with performance, a11y/accessibility, component tests, if any, deal with front end observability (more complex than backend, out of virtue of different clients and conditions the code is run on), deal with dependencies (in large places it's all in-house libraries or there's private repos to maintain), deal with CI/CD, etc, I'm probably missing more.

Twcs layoffs were due to AI cannibalizing their business model by reducing traffic to the site.

And what makes you think the backend is safe? As if churning out endpoints and services or whatever gospel by some thought leader would make it harder for an AI to do. The frontend has one core benefit, it's pretty varied, and it's an ever moving field, mostly due to changes in browsers, also due to the "JS culture". Code from 5 years ago is outdated, but Spring code from 5 years ago is still valid.

My time spent with Javascript applications has thus far been pretty brief (working on some aircraft cabin interfaces for a while), but a lot of the time ended up being on testing on numerous different types and sizes of devices, and making tiny tweaks to the CSS to account for as many devices as possible.

This has been a while; perhaps the latest frameworks account for all of that better than they used to. But at that time, I could absolutely see budgeting several days to do what seems like a few hours of work, because of all of the testing and revision.

Other people are dumping on you, but I think you're getting at where the real 20x speedup exists. People who are 'senior' in one type of programming may be 'junior' in other areas -- LLMs can and do bridge those gaps for folks trying to work outside their expertise. This effect is real.

If you're an expert in a field, LLMs might just provide a 2-3x speedup as boilerplate generators.

One of the more ignorant comments I’ve read on HN.

It's difficult for me to make a good evaluation on this comment.

With the AI writing the UI are you still getting the feedback loop so that the UI informs your backend design and your backend design informs the UI design? I think if you don't have that feedback loop then you're becoming worse of a backend designer. A good backend still needs to be front end focused. I mean you don't just optimize the routines that your profiler says, you prioritize routines that are used the most. You design routines that make things easier for people based on how they're using the front end. And so on.

But how I read your comment is that there's no feedback loop here and given my experience with LLMs they're just going to do exactly what you tell it to. Hamfisting a solution. I mean if you need a mockup design or just a shitty version then yeah, that's probably fine. But I also don't see how that is 20x since you could probably just "copy-paste from stack overflow", and I'd only wager a LLM is really giving you up to 2x there. But if you're designing something actual people (customers) are going to use, then it sounds like you're very likely making bad interfaces and slowing down development. But it is really difficult to determine which is happening here.

I mean yeah, there's a lot of dumb coders everywhere and it's not a secret that coding bootcamps focus on front ends but I think you're over generalizing here.

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