The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind. : programmer

[–] [email protected] 94 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

(let me preach a little, I have to listen to my boss gushing about AI every meeting)

Compare AI tools: now vs 3 years ago. All those 2022 "Prompt engineer" courses are totally useless in 2025.

Extrapolate into the future and realize, that you're not losing anything valuable by not learning AI tools today. The whole point of them is they don't require any proficiency. It "just works".

Instead focus on what makes you a good developer: understanding how things work, which solution is good for what problem, centering your divs.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I don't remember progressive web apps having anywhere near the level of fanfare as the other things on this list, and as someone that has built several pwas I feel their usefulness is undervalued.

More apps in the app store should be pwas instead.

Otherwise this list is great and I love it.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago

Good thing I hate web development

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

it's funny, but also holy moly do I not trust a "sign in with github" button

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I will use AI to prompt AI to code for me, free money 🤑

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

10/10. No notes.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 71 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Remember when "The Cloud" was going to put everyone in IT out of a job?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it's a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, AI is going to put some people out of work, but in turn will open lots of more specialized positions. And these positions that are lost could adapt to AI (for example, being part of the training instead of just being let go).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

There is still difference.

Cloud was FOR the IT people. Machine learning is for predicting patterns following data.

Maybe stock predictors will adapt or replace but average programmer didn't have to switch to replit because it's "cloud IDE"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I mean, isn't that what "get on or get left behind" means?

It does not necessarily mean you'll lose your job. Nor does "get on" mean you have to become a specialist on it.

The post picks specifically on things that didn't catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Yeah, I realized it suffers from (inverse) survivorship bias, only pointing out the ones that didn't survive.

Didn't one company claim something like "the internet is a fad" or "touchscreen phones are a fad" and went bankrupt/became irrelevant because they didn't adapt?

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 days ago

This technology solves every development problem we have had. I can teach you how with my $5000 course.

Yes, I would like to book the $5000 Silverlight course, please.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 days ago (3 children)

glorified autocomplete

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I use it to find easy to miss errors.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Which is honestly its best use case. That and occasionally asking it to generate a one-liner for a library call I don't feel like looking up. Any significant generation tends to go off the rails fast.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I love how it fucks up closing braces/parentheses, some advanced tech right there.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Getting it to format documentation for you seems to work a treat. Nothing too complex, just "move this bit here, split that into points".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

You sir haven't railed an entire ui out of your vibes up asshole

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It pains me so much when I see my colleagues pay OpenAI to do programming assignments.. they see it is faster to ask gpt, than learn it properly. Sadly, I can say nothing to them, or I would risk worsening relations with them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

You should probably click the link

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm glad they do. This is going to generate so much work opportunities to undo their messes.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Except that they are research students in PhD course, it would exacerbate code messiness in research paper codebases.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago

Or open source projects..

[–] [email protected] 86 points 3 days ago (3 children)

As an old fart you can’t imagine how often I heard or read that.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah but it's different this time!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history, or that did get adopted but do not have mass adoption. Hindsight is 20/20, but we live in the present and have to make our guesses about what will succeed and what will fail, and it would be nice to have better guesses.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Quality work will always need human craftsmanship

I'd wager that most revolutionary technologies are either those that expand human knowledge and understanding, and (to a lesser extent) those that increase replicability (like assembly lines)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's tricky, because there's no hard definition for what it means to "change the world", either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn't possible before, and is also reliably useful.

To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn't really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn't seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.

These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it's infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Well it’ll change the world by consuming a shit ton of electricity and using even more precious water to fill the data centres. So changing the world is correct in that regard.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

I think AI will definitively have an impact in how shit is done, but propably not the way AI bros think. It might not revolutionize the world, but become and standard.

I don't know enough about AI or about the entire IT world so I cannot 100% affirm or deny anything, though.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

I'd love to read a list of those instances/claims/tech

I imagine one of them was low-code/no-code?

/edit: I see such a list is what the posted link is about.

I'm surprised there's not low-code/no-code in that list.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

"We're gonna make a fully functioning e-commerce website with only this WYSIWYG site builder. See? No need to hire any devs!"

Several months later...

"Well that was a complete waste of time."

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You should click the link.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 3 days ago

Hehe. Damn, absolutely fell for it. Nice 😂

[–] [email protected] 99 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Had to click through to change my downvote to an upvote, lol.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Non of those examples are relevant.

Those examples are specific tools or specific implementation pattern, AI in development is a tool.

It doesn't dictate how to write software or what the written code will look like, it's a tool that speeds up your code wiring. It catches typos and silly bugs that take hours to debug, it's able to generate useful unit tests, it can clean up and apply my code style way better than codemaid or resharper ever code, it's taken care of so much tedious shit and made software development fun again.

Vibe coding is not the future of development. If you aren't learning to use AI as a tool in development, you are going to be left behind.

It's more apt to compare it to IDEs. Sure, you can still write you entire app in vim and compile it in the terminal, but you would have been very foolish to deny the future of development was in IDEs.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 3 days ago

You're describing exactly how all these web tools worked. "HTML, CSS, and JS are too hard to do manually. Here's a shiny new tool that abstracts all that away and lets you get right to making your site!" Except they all added additional headaches, security concerns, and failed to fill in edge cases, so you still need to know how to do all that HTML, CSS, and JS anyway. That's exactly how LLM generated code works now. It'll be useful and common for a while and then the technical debt will pile up and pile up and eventually everyone will look around and think "what the hell were we thinking" and tear it all down.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Thanks for summing it up so succinctly. As an aging dev, I've seen quite a lot of tech come and go. I wish more people interested in technology would spend more time learning the basics and the history of things.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I can see this partly being true in that it'll be part of a dev's toolkit. The devs at my previous job loved using it to do busy work coding.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I agree that it will continue to be a useful tool. I've gotten a similar productivity boost using AI auto-complete as I did from regular auto-complete. It's also pretty good at identifiying potential uses with code, again, a similar productivity boost as a good linter. The chatbot does make a good sounding board, especially when you don't remember the name of the concept you are trying to implement or need to pro-con two solutions and you can't find articles about it.

But all these claims of 10x improvements in development speed are horse shit. Yeah, you might be able to shit out a 5-10,000 LOC tutorial app in an hour or two with prompt engineering, but try implementing a feature in a 100,000 LOC codebase and it promptly shits the bed: hallucinating internal frameworks, microservices, ignoring internal practices, writing straight up non-functional code, etc. I'd you spend enough time prompting it, you can eventually massage the solution you need out of it; problem is, it took longer to do that than writing the damn thing yourself.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh god the hate in this sub. It is definitely another tool for a dev to use. Like autocomplete or a lot of other stuff a good IDE does to help you. If you don't want to use it, fine. Perhaps you're such a pro that you don't need anything but a text editor. If you're not, and you're ignoring it for whatever petty reasons, you'll probably fall behind all the devs who learned how to use it to get more productive (or, in developer terms, lazier)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Agreed. Like it or not, old school auto complete was the same thing, just not as advanced. That being said, comment op probably didn't click the link.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago (2 children)

"busy work coding" is that what you do when you try to look like you're working (like a real dev)?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

We're using it for closing security flaws identified by another tool. It's boring, unchallenging work that is nonetheless still important. It's also repetitive and uncreative enough that I'm comfortable having a machine do it.

There's still human review but when it's stuff like "your error messages should escape variables" or "write a longer function name" having a tool that can do most of the grunt work is valuable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Real world development isn't creating exciting apps all the time, it's writing the same exact boring convention based code sticking to an established pattern.

It can be really boring and unchallenging to create your millionth respiratory, or you can prompt your ide to create a new repo and with one sentence it will create stub out 10 minutes worth of tedious prep work. It makes programming fun again.

In one prompt, it can look at my finished code and stub out half decent documentation that otherwise wouldn't have been completed at. It does hallucinate sometimes, or it completely misunderstands the code, so you have to correct a few sentences, but the brain drain of coming to with the sentence structure to write useful documentation is completely lifted, and the code is now well documented.

AI programming is more than just vibe coding, and it's way more useful than everyone here insists it's not.

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