> More people building things is straightforwardly good

Is it? More than a decade ago there was a Cambrian explosion of software, Flash alone was the defining force of indie gaming industry. And now what? We have so much shit/shovelware that nobody wants to touch with a ten-foot pole.

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acceptable" and "decent" has thus been widening. As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". And the push is understandable as well, it's MVPs that make money and details only "increase customer satisfaction" at best (and these days, who even cares about customers?).

The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality, maybe even job satisfaction in general. As an (unfortunately anecdotal) example, I started to find myself fixing up broken websites or removing elements that get in the way with dev tools and uBlock every once in a while, and have heard from other people on here that they have been doing the same (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042747). All to restore basic functionality of websites I go on. This was never required back in the day, Flash and early web browsers didn't even have the option to do this.

Another, less anecdotal example from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

It gets worse when you realize that most of the money saved through these cuts only benefits the very top of the hierarchy.

>I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people.

And I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that the convenience from ignoring the "deep expertise" and piling on hacks and lazy abstractions, all the way to modern multi-MB frameworks and Electron, is a regression.

Of course no one gives a shit about things like the user's computer/memory utilization. Or degraded experience. Or wasted bandwidth. Or the extra energy costs per 8 billion people - and the environmental impact.

>More people building things is straightforwardly good,

Is more people building public infrastructure "straightforwardly good"? If it means worse roads, worse bridges, systems that fail?

The same holds for software. And most things really.

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

No, other people did. They wrote about it, and LLM can sometimes use that. Once they no longer write about it, what then?

> More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

That I agree with. The more the merrier, all else being the same. And if "AI" trickled into everything because of the undeniable improvements it leads to, the situation and most of the sentiments would be very different, I think.

But even then, people aren't entitled to the knowledge "created" by doing the work. If attribution and compensation were tackled in earnest, if you could only train on the materials of the people you pay to produce those materials, it might be much quicker and cheaper to just learn CSS.

Totally. Every "we're losing our craft" article has the same gloomy shape. That's enough of a bummer, but they also argue against themselves halfway through.

This one, for instance:

> But exactly which details are deemed “unimportant” is a very consequential and sometimes subjective decision. And eventually, the details always leak through.

Right, so you're saying this new technology will still reward deep technical understanding, because there's no way around it. I agree. Why is the whole tone of this thing "AI is making my craft a cheap commodity?"

Websites are largely better, technically, than they were 10 years ago. They're more full-featured, they're faster, SSL/a11y/responsiveness are stronger defaults. Content mills / SEO / news sites are a separate, terrible failure mode of ads and corporate incentives. That's not React's fault!

I used to make a living doing frontend development, and quirks and knowing idiosyncrasies is a burden to your craft. Yes, it meant there were higher barriers to entry, but it also resulted in a lot of broken websites, and I can tell you it was never fun nor rewarding.

I think the original author has a much stronger thesis around AI devaluing the craft of coding, but his specific examples don't stack up.

> this is largely accidental complexity.

Is it? I know hating CSS is a fun pastime for folks around here, but maybe it’s just that building good, rich user interfaces that people can use is an inherently hard problem.

Sure, the browser is slightly more difficult due to maintaining backwards compatibility and multiple implementations, but I’ve yet to see a better UI framework/language that has to deal with the other constraints of the web platform.

"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.

Most of software engineering is accidental complexity. Sharding, buffering, caching, load balancing, contention, async, functions, classes, recursion…

Big corporations behind LLMs are taking it all.

It doesn't seem to me that the author is saying 'AI bad, abstraction bad, knowing browser quirks GOOD'. Looks to me like someone making a specific claim about a trend where having an easier time getting off the ground can lead to a lower ceiling.

I'd read it kind of like 'The man and the butterfly' story. Or the Kant passage about how doves might wish air didn't exist, without realising that friction is exactly what permits them to fly.

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

I still don’t understand this perspective, how is it good when a growing portion of stuff that’s built is straight garbage?

Exactly. Nobody wants smalltalk programmers or IIS whisperers. You just have to embrace the idea that your skills become worthless every five years and move on.

>...and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make.

It depends. My country (Germany) introduced accessibility laws recently which enforces you to build everything public with accessibility in mind. If a page doesn't meet the expected standard you can get extremely high fines.

Yes it's still bad there's no viable headless UI in browser one can really style and it has all the a11y etc. but need extra library for selects that work etc. Invented work for no good reason. The real complexity is in diversity of devices though nowadays in the frontend.

> I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

To make the obvious counterargument, “then you shouldn’t be creating websites at all”.

I don’t actually believe this, but I know people who do. Some would add “shouldn’t be allowed to”.

> the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people

This reminds me of the Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

LLMs feel threatening to anyone who had an edge by knowing how to navigate domains with a lot of weird and complex behavior. It’s nice to feel like businesses need you if they want to solve a problem. It’s scary when a cheaper solution arrives that does 70% of that deep knowledge navigation at 1% of the cost.

Each time you say that an LLM "understands" something better than you do, you also say that you're not actually qualified to judge the LLM's understanding.

> More people building things is straightforwardly good

No it's not, its the opposite actually its very bad and leads to far far more noise in the system to sort through to find value as someone who's competent.

Yesterday we saw on the frontpage that LLM’s can’t even accurately assess if California produces literally all the almonds in the world.

The really weird gaps and inconsistencies just make it to untrustworthy. I spend so much time vetting all the outputs that it often cancels out the time it saves me, and I find enough errors that I don’t have an incentive to streamline things/not vet it.

Making UI less accessible is specifically not a trade off people are entitled to make. Accessibility is a legal requirement. This is like arguing it's ok to use robot construction workers who forget to install wheel chair ramps because "gotta go fast".

> that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make

The users are also entitled to hate your website or app. At what point do you admit you're just making excuses for cheap and sloppy work?

It really depends, up until recently (January) reading all the Temporal doc and doing the courses allowed me to frequently suggest to the current frontier model things they didn't remember. I don't know if this changed recently.

being able to increase both a11y and i18n even if imperfect are definitely a LLM value add; the problem is simply business. This doesn't make the heat->cash register bling.