3
How far back are you talking? JavaScript became a standard in 1997, and IMHO Ajax really improved the browsing experience.
This really sums up Beck's argument, that now is the perfect time to invest in junior developers, because AI allows them to learn and skill up faster:
The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning.
That sounds like Léon – The URL Cleaner, which I use on a daily basis.
This quote really sums up the situation:
This is a technical and business challenge, but also an ethical crisis. Anyone who cares to look can see the tragic consequences for those who most need the help technology can offer. Meanwhile, the lies, half-truths, and excuses made by frontend's influencer class are in defence of these approaches are, if anything, getting worse.
Through no action of their own, frontend developers have been blessed with more compute and bandwidth every year. Instead of converting that bounty into delightful experiences and positive business results, the dominant culture of frontend has leant into self-aggrandising narratives that venerate failure as success. The result is a web that increasingly punishes the poor for their bad luck while paying developers huge salaries to deliver business-undermining results.
The developer community really needs to be building websites that work on all devices and connections, and not just for those who can afford the latest technology and high-speed internet connections.
The way the author described programming in 2025 did make me chuckle, and I do think he makes some excellent points in the process.
It’s 2025. We write JavaScript with types now. It runs not just in a browser, but on Linux. It has a dependency manager, and in true JavaScript style, there’s a central repository which anyone can push anything to. Nowadays it’s mostly used to inject Bitcoin miners or ransomware onto unsuspecting servers, but you might find a useful utility to pad a string if you need it.
In order to test our application, we build it regularly. On a modern computer, with approximately 16 cores, each running at 3 GHz, TypeScript only takes a few seconds to compile and run.
As the author notes, it is very impressive what generative AI can produce these days.
The frontier of what the LLMs can do has moved since the last time I tried to vibe-code something. I didn’t expect to have a working interpreter the same day I dreamt of a new programming language. It now seems possible.
However, as they point out, there's definitely downsides to this approach.
The downside of vibe coding the whole interpreter is that I have zero knowledge of the code. I only interacted with the agent by telling it to implement a thing and write tests for it, and I only really reviewed the tests. I reckon this would be an issue in the future when I want to manually make some change in the actual code, because I have no familiarity with it.
His experiences reveal a pattern: AI can rapidly produce 70% of a solution, but that final 30% – edge cases, security, production integration – remains as challenging as ever. Meanwhile, trust in AI-generated code is declining even as adoption increases.
I'm very much intrigued by this contradiction where where adoption of AI is increasing, but the trust in the code it generates is declining. Is it a case of the more developers use AI coding tools, the more they become aware of the shortcomings and problems?
I'm not an architect, but I do dislike how much of development work has AWS wrangling, dealing with the architectural hoops that are mentioned in the article
There is Whisper IME.
A good companion piece to this article, is the Dead Framework Theory article, which discusses AI coding tools bolstering React's dominance.
Preact is not new, it's been around for about a decade.
I had originally meant to post it here, but I accidentally posted it to a different instance.