A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over(dbushell.com) |
A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over(dbushell.com) |
Dude, it's not 2021 anymore. You can't just yell a big, bold, name like racist and expect it to stick or cause any impact. Everyone got burned out in 2021 of the million -ists, and the 2024 election showed among other things that the name calling has zero effect.
The world belongs to those who can actually explain why any particular opinion is a bad thing, or conflicts with values that the reader may otherwise hold, not those who can accuse with a cheap label.
I care about people who think that just yelling "he's a racist" somehow scores them brownie points or does something about it. It doesn't. You're not brave, you're not noble, you're not accomplishing anything.
Why is all of your personal opinion on if people are doing it for "brownie points" important and not just being pompous?
But in ten years we'll be using LLMs even more than today. I'm sure of it.
This is a lot more like the dot-com boom than like crypto or IoT. The internet really was a trillion-dollar industry, and AI will be too.
All those previous silver bullets are still with us. This one's not going away either.
What's _not_ going to happen is what's desired by this article which can basically be condensed into 3 bullet points to be appended to your initial spec to Opus 5.5.
I don't want to see this person's dreams crushed, but _log linear charts keep going up and to the right_. I also don't think we're entitled to the high status and pay jobs we currently have 'by right'. We've been useful - we've been _very_ useful and we've done very well for ourselves. We've been the shovels in the gold rush. Now we have to hope we can adapt and that we still provide value commensurate to our pay.
I didn't become a software engineer for the money - I just happened to one day have my hobby become a lucrative career, so perhaps my viewpoint is a little different. All the stuff that is important to the author is still stuff they can do, they just probably won't receive the status and remuneration they think they're entitled to.
I can't honestly say so, though.
Yet, I can say I am so excited for the future! For once, I don't want to wake up in the future — I'm loving being at the heart of it, seeing it progress and watching it allow people to be more creative and more empowered.
Some people I know also seem to believe this? Like all the AI providers are going to go bankrupt and we'll just go back to what there was before? Do they not realize that indeed the productivity gains are there?
Sure, there's a lot to be debated about how this fell on many people's laps, on how they are being asked to do more, with the same pay and sometimes putting in more hours. These are pressing issues that have emerged as a natural (or, well, maybe forced for some) consequence of a complete shakeup in the world in general. But I don't think society (i.e. most people) will go back to what was before unless we actually have some form of devastation that really physically prevents us from doing so.
If OpenAI and Anthropic and what have you go bankrupt, others will continue. Maybe the economics will look a bit different, but to think we will just go back to what it was seems, to me, completely nonsensical. But maybe I'm the one spouting nonsense. We'll see in a few years...
As far as what AI actually provides, at the end of the day its cheaper software faster (or that's the promise). You still need to build products and maybe you can do that with less folks now. You're not writing assembly today. The machine does it. But you're still working on software. Maybe with AI you're programming less and working on UX more. Is that earth shattering change?
We've yet to hit a point where you any of the big software companies have been overthrown by an AI startup... Whats the revolution really? Its captured the mindshare of the industry but we're at a point of being practically disgusted by AI products already.
Things won't literally go back to 2019. But there could certainly be a return to normalcy in store.
Well, it cuts both ways, the other earth shattering change is Designers taking on more programming/engineering work.
The main issue for front end development is that companies (particularly large ones) have been releasing shitty broken UI/UX for so long that this stuff became the norm.
Either way the article does not even explain what "blows over" mean. A lot of people seem to be fearfully reacting to the title alone.
But with sites? I made a big picture spec sheet, and asked ChatGPT to expand on that. Then I fed that spec sheet into sites. 30 minutes later it spit out a perfectly working site of what I had tried to make a year ago. Not only that, it was much richer, and had more features. I asked for around 10 changes and new features, and all but one worked flawlessly. One time it managed to break functionality, but it was swiftly fixed. I didn't write or edit a single line of code. NOT A SINGLE ONE.
I've previously been on the buying side, and this was a website which could have easily ended up costing $10k-$15k with all the functionality. If not more. And I ended up getting that with my measly $20 subscription.
Web dev as a career is not dead, or dying, but I predict that A LOT of the people that would make those $0 - $10k sites are going to have a tough time ahead.
EDIT: This was also on par with my general experience with AI. For the longest time you can use frontier models, be unhappy with the results and tell yourself this sucks - and then out of nowhere some updates comes along, and suddenly everything just works perfectly well.
i've held on hope for a year, but can no longer
we're a non-unionized industry up against very powerful people who want to deskill the field
i want hope, if you have any send my way.. unfortunately things are not looking good
And have tools to do so
Most web traffic is robotic. The internet is hostile to humans now. Apps gatekeep and monitor our access. LLMs build it. Nothing about the internet is evolving in the direction of a structure created by humans for humans.
Perhaps the disruption is to something even worse.
My own experience, probably similar to a lot of people's own experience is that i haven't written code by hand (at least 10 lines) in 2026, i can work with any web/backend framework/language because LLMs can.
I'm now an architect / team leader, i manage a team of devs (LLM) and i mostly spend my day providing guidance/suggestions and making architectural choices.
I've never built things that fast, it makes no sense to hand write code anymore as it's so slow. When i run out of tokens, i just wait (doing some reviews, code reads, etc ...), but it doesn't make sense to spend a day writing some code that gonna be generated in a few minutes when tokens are back ...
Obviously this is my personal experience, there's other industries / use cases / etc ... where hand writing code makes sense. But it's not my case anymore.
> CSS should be hard
I don’t see how the author can square these two. If accessibility is important, the CSS which enables it should be easy. And what about accessibility from a web dev perspective? If doing the right thing requires arcane knowledge do you think most people will buy a book on CSS to master the thing that AI is actively de-skilling?
In my opinion, the author needs to take their own advice. Talk to actual people who need web dev work, figure out what they want to pay for that can’t easily be done by machines, and get good at that.
a good comparison is like using a sword vs a gun. ofc in certain scenarios the sword is going to be the right tool / better than a gun. but 99.99% of the time you're gonna want to use the gun and refusing to do so bc it's different or bc you mastered the sword and have some pride isn't going to end well for you.
i find coding agents etc to be really useful and am excited about it. the thing i'm waiting to blow over is for a good work / life / human centric balance to be accepted as the norm. i'm tired of coding agents / ai being the reason behind "if you aren't shipping a critical feature like handling payments in 3 days, you're trash"
Job is a job. There are few reasons a new technology would change employment for better, and also quite some reasons it could change being employed for worse.
It won't be 2019, that I am sure. There are brain worms around, sure. But this genie is not going back in the box.
1) Become world class experts in one thing 2) Become full on invested in LLMs learn on how to match general intelligence on business requirements (Evals, isolation, judging,etc..) I think this will probably be still 5 years 3) Get ready to do something in real life.
Good luck, unless you're very high IQ or a wealthy teenager.
Also you have to become a world class expert in something deemed valuable.
React is out and no one should learn it? Really? Something like half the Javascript job listings mention React ... but someone trying to get a job should not learn it?
Now to be fair I haven't job hunted in about half a year, so the market may have changed a little now that I have my (React-based) job ... but it hasn't changed so much that the most popular web framework has somehow become dead tech.
A year ago, I asked ChatGPT to design me a 3D model for a wallet, the kind you can stick to the back of a phone with a magnet. It screwed it up over and over, never got to anything usable.
Last week I tried again, just explaining in words what to do, and it made what I had in my mind.
For websites, it's over. Any kind of brochure/simple restaurant booking site, that was easy years ago and trivial now. SaaS is going next, of course there's a lot of types of SaaS but your average "web implementation of commonly needed service" is now very easily copied with AI.
Anything like a task list or information management system with no particular constraints in terms of performance or scale, you can just make an AI customize for you.
While everyone has been decrying site-builders for years, I recall a conversation I had around 16 with a small business owner.
I was trying to make some money and convince this guy to let me make him a site. What he said has stuck with me. It was something along the lines of:
"Why do I need a website. Most of my customers find me, contact and and engage with me on Facebook. I need someone who can manage a social media page"
Of course, that definitely was not my forte.
Not even the first time this happened. When I was in high school you could make great money building websites for small businesses that nowadays just have an Instagram account and no website. The number of CMSes I've built in my career is too damn high
Last December/January seems to have been the tipping point from too flawed to be really useful into something pretty good for dev work, so this seems about right.
Hardware is going to get cheaper (as it always does over the long term) and even if the commercial models enshittify¹ to something too contaminated by ads to be bearable the open models won't. We're not going back.
For now it looks like the ability to lead these tools to good solutions is valuable. I guess we'll see if it carries on so. Not much we can do if it isn't except move with the times.
¹ I'm actually fairly optimistic about that at the moment because so far we are the customers.
Second, I'm really curious what's your "adapt" path, because I suspect you're in denial too. Accept that, before long, an LLM will not need you to write good prompts, tell it to "keep going", or say "no, that's wrong". What's your value then? Does your employer keep you on the payroll as charity? For old times' sake? If your value is just supervising AI, then your value is declining rapidly.
People in unskilled professions don't have choice when automation shows up and takes their jobs. Software engineering may go down in history as one of the few highly skilled professions that didn't just keel over and die, but enthusiastically embraced its own demise.
The only thing I can think of is the reduction of truffles as an ingredient, which apparently happened around WWI. We eat a lot fewer of them than before.
> Second, I'm really curious what's your "adapt" path, because I suspect you're in denial too. Accept that, before long, an LLM will not need you to write good prompts, tell it to "keep going", or say "no, that's wrong". What's your value then? Does your employer keep you on the payroll as charity? For old times' sake? If your value is just supervising AI, then your value is declining rapidly.
Your employer cannot talk to all the LLM sessions at the same time. He also can't write a prompt that will do it for him.
> People in unskilled professions don't have choice when automation shows up and takes their jobs. Software engineering may go down in history as one of the few highly skilled professions that didn't just keel over and die, but enthusiastically embraced its own demise.
It's changed several times over the decades. How many people are working on a mainframe nowadays? How many people are writing assembly? Look at how many languages have come and gone too. LLM is a big change, but that doesn't mean software people will be gone.
"When all this blows over" you will still have open source models that are at least as capable as right now, probably more.
No new governments on the DAO, no ubiquitous programs running on the chain, no magical new answer to “fiat”… just a lot of empty promises and waste.
No one here ever seems to learn.
Is your thesis that AI is useless? Because that seems like fantasy to me.
There is maybe a case to make around the economics of AI companies, but even there I'm very skeptical because the open models are quite capable on relatively inexpensive hardware.
I really cannot wrap my mind around the idea that LLMs will just not be a part of everyday life in the future — in tech and everywhere else...
But instead, humans preferred the productivity AND the readability AND maintainability that elevated us above assembly. Maybe AI-generated code will get there also.
For example, we rigidly require specs that can be used to drive end to end tests. Commits can’t break builds or tests. 100% test coverage required for both unit and integration/E2E tests.
And all of this alongside adding macOS/iOS/Android to our standard builds instead of just web/electron. Oh. And moving backends to Rust/Go.
When the RAM bubble pops you'll be seeing cards with 4X this amount of RAM for that price.
ML isn’t useless, that’s been obvious for a while, but it’s grossly overhyped and people here who think their vibe-coding isn’t ultimately worthless are delusional.
To me and many others who were there this feels a lot like the dot com boom. It was hyped like crazy. Many companies got huge valuations and then disappeared almost overnight when the bubble popped, but overall the hype was not just valid but under stated.
> People here who think their vibe-coding isn’t ultimately worthless are delusional
Depends what you value, I guess, I mean ultimately everything is dust and ashes. But if you think that typical vibe-coding output is more worthless than typical pre-LLM coding then you're just wrong.
What I see in this hype round that's relatively novel is a lot of people trying to persuade themselves that it might all go away if they wish hard enough.
ML has uses, those uses probably don’t make anyone rich on their own without the current pattern of hype and fraud. Those uses probably won’t end up replacing white collar work as it would have to for the valuations involved to be sane.
Maybe.
Maybe it can’t solve a Millennium Prize, but it’s pretty good at writing CSS.
If optimizing inference was a priority, OpenAI and Anthropic could also focus on it and get the prices down. They are just focusing on their dumb AGI race instead.
If anything, prices would go _down_ as the rehosters wouldn't be saddled with debt from training models.
It was very unclear that this was your argument. Sure. Maybe. I don't much care either way.
> Those uses probably won’t end up replacing white collar work
Ironically the only way I see you being correct here is if it generates so much economic growth that it indirectly creates more jobs than it destroys (which I don't think is a wildly unlikely scenario).
When Taalas burned Llama 3.1 to the HC1 they saw at least an order of magnitude more tokens per joule. That saving is sitting right there, today, ready for anyone who is willing to say "this is the model we're freezing on for a couple of years".
It also seems plausible that it will take many years until hardware price/performance reaches a point where companies can provide models people deem acceptable at unsubsidized prices people deem acceptable. I don't know.
This is a lot more like the PC or the Internet than cryptocurrency.
Huh.
In fact I'm more or less at the point where I don't even want the model to get better, I care more that it outputs faster.
2.6 years is about 16x in a decade.