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Comment by bumblehean | Hacker News Reader

>Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow.

But that's how you learn...

I lost my desire to learn anything about web development twenty years ago and specialized my career in a completely different direction. I had not touched HTML at all since then until earlier this year, when I discovered that AI robots could do it for me. Now I am happy to whip up HTML/CSS/JavaScript visualizers, explorers, and even one-off interactive report presentations whenever they might be useful, precisely because I don't have to learn any of that crap to do it. My time & attention are far more productively spent focused on the work I am actually good at and interested in doing.

Working with the browser technology stack is living in a dystopian world of overcomplicated, often duplicative features defined in many thousands of pages of specifications, often revised and/or contradicted by other specifications, many of which do not apply to the reality of actual implementations, so encyclopedic knowledge of the specifications is not enough -- you need familiarity with everything written on the internet about these APIs. Accessing even conceptually simple features can require navigating through multiple APIs that purport to provide that feature, most of which have fatal shortcomings in design, specification, or real-world support. AI is a godsend here, at least for now ... I wonder what the impending post-human-developer "model collapse" will yield.

There was some learning, but also a lot of waste. As a self-learner, I've never been able to learn so fast as I can now with an LLM to instantly answer my specific questions, and incrementally correct and grow my mental model. And while with some subjects you need to worry about accuracy, LLMs are generally very good with programming questions, and (for most types of questions) you can verify their claims yourself.

The problem with CSS is it's a) all broad and no depth and b) constantly adding major new paradigms. If you don't get up to speed and stay there, you lose it.

Pre-AI I'd say I've gotten over the hump 3 times with CSS, only to lose it again by the next time I had to use it in volume.

It is not the only way to learn.

Why do you think thats worth learning? Doing a few times manually sure… but to force yourself to solely rely on it is foolish. Just use the calculator.

We don't need to learn CSS anymore. Just like we don't need to learn ASM since GCC does a great job generating it from higher-level code.

I am a frontend engineer and I see so many bugs from vibe-coded CSS from people who think just like you. CSS is very powerful and easy to get wrong if you don't understand it. Since most CSS code on the internet is not good, LLMs do not generate good CSS code and create a lot of bugs ranging from bad performance to completely broken reflow.

Funnily enough, I seem to remember some people saying that compiler generated assembly wasn’t as good as handmade assembly.

For early compilers in certain contexts, this was once true.

the question is, what's the business cost of some amount of css bugs vs paying specialists or people to learn these details.

the generalists win overall, except of course for specific cases where specialists are great

I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days.

For many cases like the one described, its true.

It's not. The majority of people regularly using GCC to develop C code (IOW, the primary use case of GCC) are familiar with assembly.

How familiar? Do they ever look at the .S files? know what ar and nm do? Deal with objdump? How important are those details for day-to-day compiling of C code for regular programmers?

Yes, they know what ar and nm do. Whether these things are relevant for day-to-day compiling of C code is watching the goalposts sail over the horizon; the original statement being mocked here is "we don't need to learn ASM because GCC is so good", which completely betrays ignorance of why people learn still learn and deal with ASM to this day. Even if LLMs were comparable to compilers either in predictability (they're not) or code quality (they're not), the people who know what they're doing still take pains to understand how their tech stacks work, because that makes them better programmers, and this will continue to be true.

It's not sarcasm.

We've all accepted that code-generation has been required and accepted for decades.

Code generation (by compiler) has one major difference: it's deterministic.

Here are the reported miscompilation bugs in GCC so far in 2026. The ones labeled "wrong-code".

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?chfield=%5BBug%20cr

I count 500+ of them.

That's not what "deterministic" means.

Not sure what your point is here since wrong code doesn't mean non-deterministic. How many of these yield different results with the same input and architecture?

Learning ASM will actually teach you a lot about how the computer works, and I doubt learning CSS deeply teaches you much about design fundamentals.

Define "we".

The people who make the tools that generate your assembly instructions need to learn it. Just like the people who make the browser rendering engine and push CSS forward still need to learn it.

The people who don't need to learn asm never needed to learn it. If you wouldn't code in asm now, you wouldn't have ever.

This " logic" is so irrational.

I just want to point out the exception - the person who the AI learns from.

Someone has to know it. And to advance it to the next level requires domain level expertise. Or are we allowing LLM's to determine the next CSS snapshot/version/level/whatever?

Experts work on gcc so everyone else doesn’t have to.

Yes

Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more. These days, I mostly copy and paste from tickets to the LLM, and then rubber stamp the output. I have people in my team that try to care about what they're making, but they're generating less code, and filling tickets more slowly, than I am. Even when it comes to system design and architecture, the LLMs aren't great at it, but honestly, they're better than my coworkers (I'd say system architecture is probably at the same readiness level that coding was last year). Expertise wouldn't really help you get things done faster.

You could probably replace me with a minimum wage worker to do some manual testing and copy-paste errors from the console into the LLM, and still be fine.

Let's see how long it is before the next round of layoffs, I guess. For now, the money's fine and the work's boring but ok.

But, no, the LLMs rewarding expertise line is pure cope. Software is not really skilled labor any more.

(obviously, throwaway -- I'm not interested in potentially advertising this to my employer)

> Honestly, we don't really need to learn any more.

Perhaps for your task of closing Jira tickets that’s true - but the you have a decision to make: wait until you’re eliminated or try to anticipate where future competitiveness comes from.

Yeah, that's the thing; future competitiveness isn't going to come from learning, at least not from learning about software. The LLMs have that covered, and software is becoming low status work anyways.

It's largely going to come from interpersonal skills and being likeable enough to be the face of the projects and companies. Technical skill is rapidly dropping in value.

This claim can only be true if LLMs have completely mastered all intellectual aspects of creating and shipping software.

That's so far from being true it's like saying that humans are currently an interplanetary, post-scarcity species.

All? obviously not, but enough that I can ship more than my colleagues while not really paying attention to the output or fully understanding it. Technical skills aren't unnecessary, they're just becoming something that nobody will pay for.

LLMs debug extremely well, generate code well enough, and do high level design acceptably, but fail in weird ways, so my actual work these days (outside of delegating to the LLM) is mostly manual testing. I need to give them nudges sometimes, but a year ago they needed constant nudges. In another year, I expect that it'll be good enough that pasting in a bug report with the right jargon will be all the nudging I need to get something that customers will accept if it gets shipped. They're already close.

It's obviously going to remain pretty manual without some breakthroughs, but it's largely not work that needs a ton of intelligence or skill. The world hasn't caught up with software development being a few steps up from burger flipping, so I'm still getting paid well to do it, and I'll keep collecting that paycheck as long as it lasts. But learning about code is rapidly becoming relatively valueless.

I wish it was different, I actually enjoyed getting paid to learn, but I play with the cards I'm dealt.

It's inefficient though. With LLMs you can get a correct answer instantly for asking the right question, and if it's not perfect you can iterate on it. With your typical googling loop you wasted a ton of time on things you didn't need.

Yes, but sometimes I don't need and want to learn. One example from my recent experience in research -- building custom dashboard pages for results of scientific analyses. Each analysis is bespoke, and building interactive webpages is simply not the skill many researchers have (and it's boring IMO). But here with LLM you could easily explore the results visually/share them with collaborators etc. There are plenty examples like that. But certainly there are cases where learning is required.

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