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Comment by re-thc | Hacker News Reader

> For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA

That hasn’t been tech for a long time.

Frontend has been changing forever. React and friends have new releases all the time. Node has new package managers and even Deno and Bun. AWS keeps changing things.

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You really shouldn't use the absolute hellscape of churn that is web dev as an example of broader industry trends. No other sub-field of tech is foolish enough to chase hype and new tools the way web dev is.

I think the web/system dichotomy is also a major conflating factor for LLM discussions.

A “few hundred lines of code” in Rust or Haskell can be bumping into multiple issues LLM assisted coding struggles with. Moving a few buttons on a website with animations and stuff through multiple front end frameworks may reasonably generate 5-10x that much “code”, but of an entirely different calibre.

3,000 lines a day of well-formatted HTML template edits, paired with a reloadable website for rapid validation, is super digestible, while 300 lines of code per day into curl could be seen as reckless.

Exactly this. At work, I’ve seen front-end people generating probably 80% of their code because when you set aside framework churn, a lot of it is boilerplatey and borderline trivial (sorry). Meanwhile, the programmers working on the EV battery controller that uses proprietary everything and where a bug could cause an actual explosion are using LLMs as advanced linters and that’s it.

There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done.

To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL version becoming EOL) in the last 4 years that I've worked at my current company.

While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.

I don't need to keep obsessing over whether Codex or Claude have a 1 point lead in a gamed benchmark test so long as I'm still able to ship features without a lot of churn.

> There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though

Well sure. Like there's McDonalds and let's just not care about health or better tastes. The world keeps improving or you're left behind.

> While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.

I haven't touched nom in a long time. No it can't get things done. I dread running it and would cancel it before I can wait for it to complete. Luckily we did get yarn, pnpm and then Bun and life is improving.

> To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since

They have e.g. RSC i.e. React Server Components? See... point proven. You need to keep up. Things like Vercel force it on you.

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