A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over

hungryhobbit

Terrible advice in this article. 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.

timmmmmmay

author appears to think that at some point in the future we'll all agree to go back to how we were writing code in 2019. unclear why

css_apologist

i so desperately want this to be true 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

uejc_ger

What a bunch of nonsense.

sendhello

Bro, I think you are too deep into tech twitter (X). React is still king , almost every job opening for web needs it. Even the ones at OpenAI and Anthropic.

overcast

This dude is DEEP into the denial stage. Adapt or die, we're(the world) is not going backwards.

kbar13

llms / ai have already changed the landscape of tech, it's reaching into almost all industries. 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"

gjsman-1000

"DHH is a racist!" 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.

jvwww

Looks like OP is never returning from the Winchester.

TrackerFF

I have to say, the other day I tested out ChatGPT sites. Around a year ago I built a website for a rehearsal space - a booking system app - and spent a whole day with ChatGPT building it. It was janky, ugly, and getting there was a process. FWIW, traditional systems dev is what I learned, but I know fuck all about front-end, and I'm not too well versed on web dev in general. I did have to get under the hood and do some coding after I ran out of usage with ChatGPT back then. 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.

t0mpr1c3

"the web is a human creation for human needs" 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.

holoduke

Frontend development will be the first that will be completely replaced by agentic development where nobody needs to see any code at all. Its already possible and many companies are having this way of working quite succesfully. The quality is already better than 99% of what frontend engineers can achieve. Speed is just insane. I can create any ui. Whether it's web or platform specific. There are hardly any limitations. Frameworks are still useful. But I expect them to become less important. What remains important as a dev is system knowledge. Understanding of how systems are tight together. The principles of distributed systems, security, prompt engineering, agentic automation. And that kind of knowledge. Code syntax is from the old era. Maybe there is a niche for it. But not for the majority.

nullbyte

ok, the politics sections is a bit much lol

micromacrofoot

I wish I could agree, but AI (as LLMs) is absolutely not blowing over. Even if frontier labs crash and burn I'm already running a model that's maybe only a month behind them, locally, in my house. Last year this was impossible within a reasonable budget. Next year it's going to be better and cheaper to do. My phone can already run models as capable as last year's. Horse has left the barn.

preciousoo

A sustainable phone operator career, for when all this “world wide web” thing blows over

jwpapi

Reads like copium to me.

bambax

Didn't know DHH was a fucking racist, but I'm not surprised. Never heard about Guillermo Rauch before this post, and now I wish I hadn't.

mylesdawson

This was...not a great read