AI is really good at making things that look like they work.
This is a steelman of your argument.
But where are Frontpage and Dreamweaver now ?
They did. Now it's all JSX or htmx or some other favored template or DSL monstrosity. Most people do not write HTML or CSS, and haven't in decades. You're spot on.
This says nothing about quality, however. Quality of HTML/CSS is purely subjective. A website's presentation layer cannot meet any technical standard metric for quality in engineering or manufacturing such as durability, reliability, efficiency, or safety.
SPAs didn’t go mainstream until almost 10 years after 2006. And even at their height they never represented the majority of all websites.
But also most SPAs aren’t any less HTML by hand than using PHP templates are.
And if you needed to manipulate strings to generate HTML, you'd be doing so with some kind of template mechanism, like string concatenation or substring substitutions. John Resig, author of jQuery, wrote Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja in 2008 [1], offering a small templating engine that does exactly that. The first commit in the Underscore library credits this book for their `template` method [2].
I think your chronology is skewed or confused. "SPAs" have been brewing in some form since the mid-2000's, when people stopped writing plain old HTML and CSS. Everything was jQuery UI widgets and AJAX, Prototype and Underscore templates. HTML died a very long time ago.
[1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/secrets-of-the-javascript-ninj...
[2]: https://github.com/jashkenas/underscore/commit/02ede85b539a8...
The ability to do SPAs existed, but the vast majority of people weren’t building them. The time period you’re talking about was peak rails erb templates. Which is definitely “writing html by hand”.
I knew plenty of people who were getting paid to convert psd mockups into HTML/CSS around that time. There was a whole industry around hand written psd to HTML, which was eventually mostly outsourced to India.
In 2008 I made most of my money making static brochure sites for small/mid-sized businesses. Most small businesses around that time had something similar. It was very easy back then to browse most of the web with JavaScript disabled.
I - being old as dirt - was also around for it. Circa 2002 or 2003, we were writing CMSs in PHP which were already well beyond the simplistic concept of rendering HTML tables from database columns. Smarty templates were pretty common back then. It's hard to treat these templates as "writing HTML by hand" because the templates are a higher level of abstraction.
Rails was quite popular, but I never got into it. I went from PHP to Python (avoiding Django) and then to nodeJS. At the time, the MVC architecture was making a comeback, but the mapping of HTML/CSS/JS was never 1:1 with it. Small fragments of HTML and CSS where always littering the JS or PHP/Python. The clean separation was never fully realized. For this reason, JSX was seen as a real win.
The reason I chose to focus specifically on "templates and DSLs" in my original comment is because once the level of abstraction is raised to the point where HTML becomes a compilation target, it is no longer HTML by definition. The browser cannot render the template or DSL without the preprocessor (XSLT is about as close as that ever got). This is especially true with client-side templates. For example, using pre-made widgets like jQuery date pickers is so far removed from writing HTML that a reasonable conclusion is that jQuery developers do not know HTML or JavaScript as a matter of course [1]. But yeah, this was all burgeoning in the early/mid 2000's, and really kicked into full throttle with jQuery.
> It was very easy back then to browse most of the web with JavaScript disabled.
It was easier, but not fool-proof. Client-side rendering wasn't in full swing, but Java Applets, Shockwave, and Flash certainly were in the years leading up to it.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-people-who-know-jQuery-b...
Parallels to the industrial revolution are apparent. And this is disturbing.
it's look like clean and polished but its full of mess, and duplicate code, no conventions..
we're generating code faster but at what price. but the real and deep project intelligence still a bottleneck.
Until they go wrong because they are not good inside.
We’re in some weird stage of capitalism where everything is a grift and nobody really cares anymore.
I've felt this way for a long time now. There's no substance to anything anymore. The US economy feels like a more advanced Nigerian scam, where very few things that the US makes provides anything of actual value and substance. Americans just can't afford quality anymore. We decided we'd like to have significant amounts of garbage rather than fewer quality things. This change was likely due to revving the economy toward quarterly profit goals and GDP growth over everything else. Theoretically, prioritizing investments should have "trickled down" where companies could have more capital to invest in workers, R&Dand quality...but instead it all just got soaked up into executive pay and the stock market.
Once you start noticing private companies (like some restaurant chains) manage to both treat their employees better and serve their customers better than the publicly traded ones, it seems like a very consistent trend.
Having pursuit of endless growth to appease otherwise uninvolved shareholders might not be the best way to do "capitalism".
How good something is inside is directly responsible for how well it works. Your customers might not care about the former, but they will care when your cuts to the former impact the latter (and they always do impact it, in the end).
For the most part, people don’t need a thousand new features; the investment class does. Nobody gets mad at Craigslist.
The problem is... what can we practically do? When the village fish monger 200 years ago sold shoddy fish, you could go to him, give him a few whacks with his fish, and even if the fish monger didn't improve the quality of the fish he sold in response, you at least got some kind of feeling you got justice.
Nowadays? For most of the world, those responsible for the bad software aren't in the same village any more, for 95% of the world's population the USA is on an entirely different continent. Can't do anything to hold anyone accountable, with the exception of cancelling a 5$/month subscription LOL and yelling at some poor Filipino or Indian callcenter grunt. If you're among the lucky 5% that lives in the US, sure, you can file lawsuits if the problem is egregious enough, but that's expensive and consumer protection has been gutted. And doing a copy of a plumber's brother event? Might give you people treating you like jesus-come-to-earth but in the end you'll still face capital punishment for it, if you don't get taken out by the private security of the uber rich before you can even raise your gun.
Whatever the eventual solution to the problem you raise will end up being, it is certain it will not be pretty... bottled up rage is not good for any society.
I looked at some examples and couldn't tell the difference.
I'm thinking of this awful slop "art" I saw on Wayfair yesterday. As a surfer, it's hilarious. That's not how you stand on a board. It's not even a board. And the wave is terrible-- nobody wants to surf shorebreak like that! https://www.wayfair.com/decor-pillows/pdp/design-art-4-hawai...
I guess it could be a useful signal-- if you meet someone and they have it up in their home, you know they don't surf.
More generally, I think anything AI produces that's dense with factual details is inherently trash.
There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh.
Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying.
The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself. And current rhetoric for that matter.
"Why do you guys hate AI so much? All I did was tell you it's so great that it makes your skills worthless and how glad I am that I won't need people like you around in the future to make art and designs. What's wrong with that?"
It is just ... we insulted those people, told them they are worthless, when they want to talk about things they like doing we tell them they should use AI and then we act all puzzled they hate us. How could that happen.
And you can see it again and again.
There's a large amount of voices, both online and off, that are sneering. Between crabs in a bucket happy that software devs are being clawed down, and people happy thinking they no longer need us
I'm worn down by a cacophony of voices telling me I'm no longer wanted or needed. I'm very tired.
We're all facing very hard times ahead of us, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little cathartic to watch this unfold. Programmers, too, were just as arrogant until only a few years ago. As were doctors, lawyers... The list goes on. How the mighty have fallen.
Now we just gotta allow AIs to replace all these lavishly compensated CEOs too. Now that'd be epic.
A lot of people are looking at AI now and seeing that its proponents sound like cartoon villains. That sends a message.
The only crime here would be stopping the AI onslaught just short of replacing the really powerful people. Let it happen.
But pretty soon after that it's "Why am I paying a transcriptionist $3/minute when I can just have the machine auto-transcribe it and then my admin assistant can just scan it for mistakes."
Even if there still IS a quality difference between great writers and AI product, "good enough" is good enough for most customers, especially if you have to pay professional rates to get better.
Grandkid's sports club had an AI-made song about the group at Christmas. It was "good enough" for that. Did they steal the job of a local band? Well, in the sense that the club would have had to commission a song. But in reality, the club wouldn't have paid money for that.
They won't pay money to commission Anthropic (or in that case I assume something like Suno) to make the song in the future either. They just won't pay the money at all. A lot of "valuable" human work will be replaced, but it won't be profitable for the companies. I bet more stuff is being transcribed now than ever before -- but not much money is being made on it.
Mass unemployment equals riots equals an end to the status quo.
I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying?
Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?
> Take copywriting. It was a profession that took years to master and paid well. This changed slowly as more professionals joined the market, even after the demand spike driven by ecommerce and adtech. Now, LLMs have destroyed the job for the vast majority of professionals.
Even if code typing goes away, a new breed of engineering will take it's place.