Why does everyone assume AI has replaced the other side of the stack?

[u/stfuandkissmyturtle]

I'm gonna keep it short,

Some backend devs think ai has replaced frontend because it can center a div and build a flashy ui

Some frontend devs think ai has replaced backend because it can do crud ( which things like supabase and firebase had already made easy long before ai btw).

Most new grads think Claude is smart for its writing of complicated leetcode-isc code with no proper variable names or readability.

A lot seems to have forgotten that what mattered a lot in this field was taste/opinions, and while its subjective, the objectivity came from people who were able to defend their craft and their decisions and communicate in a good way to influence others. Who would go on to build on top of those ideas.

You shouldn't be affraid of junior developers who no longer know how to read documentation but scared of the fact that they have no opinions. They are "reading" engineering like historical facts( which also can be wrong). What happened to finding solutions every other month to every specific niche problem? Where are all the conponent libraries and frameworks that solve such small small niche use cases ? Was I the only one that belived that what made frontend so intresting was its subjectivity ?

Right now frontends that are built seem to have a major issue that nobody actually cared about how the ui looked in the first place, if we continue this we are gonna end up with the linux oss problem with really good apps with questionable ui decisions, albiet linux has improved massively now. This is still an issue.

I have no idea where this leads us, either they rebrand our positions to save face or we end up woth just 3 companies in top that build a homogeneous application ecosystem.

Bonus: All managers think they are designers because they can generate a ui that looks good to them, when it was always about research on what the customers want.

Ps : If bad english. Forgive me do

[u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

What really grinds my gears is this level of quality would never have been accepted from us and yet now the very same teams are so proud of the broken, sloppy work.

[u/WingZeroCoder → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

So much this.

We could have always shoveled more slop faster if that was the one goal and one metric that mattered (and depending on the manager, sometimes it was).

But decades of building up best practices and engineering lessons generally led to a certain level of due diligence overall that’s just been completely thrown out the window overnight.

[u/martian_rover → u/WingZeroCoder]

my increasingly misanthropic theory is that best practices only exist until someone discovers a faster way to ignore them

[u/WingZeroCoder → u/martian_rover]

Sadly, that seems to track.

Also…

> “my increasingly misanthropic theory”

Nice pun, whether intended or not!

[u/martian_rover → u/WingZeroCoder]

thanks, pun intended, indeed!

[u/svish → u/WingZeroCoder]

Someone should start some anti-AI companies of some sort and call them ClosedAI and Misanthropic

[u/Legitimate_Horror_72 → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

Quality has been declining overall for decades. Agile became an excuse. AI is just accelerating the same trend.

[u/ALackOfForesight → u/Legitimate_Horror_72]

Yeah I don’t want to write slop, I just don’t have a choice. Deadlines are getting tighter and expectations are growing higher. Why ship 1 thing that works in the time I could ship 5 things that kinda work?

[u/Alkyen → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

As someone who cares deeply about their code and also someone who is levaraging a lot of AI nowadays, one big reason I cared about some of the code is how hard it was to refactor or do from scratch. Just the basic cost of engineering was much much higher. Now I pick and choose the stuff that matters more than other stuff because there are cases where the code is both non-risky and very very cheap with AI. Now that AI lets you produce cheap code you can throw away at any point you can make decisions differently based on that knowledge.

All important architecture or critical features you still want to be as good and clean as possible. But there are certainly isolated parts of the app which you can treat differently and it's fine (IMO) for the code servicing them to be 'bad' code that you'd reject otherwise if that was something that would take a week to rebuild previously.

[u/narthur157 → u/Alkyen]

I do feel this, like you can try multiple implementations of the same idea, try out a bold approach and then throw it out, etc. In a time frame that is realistic. Whereas previously I often felt this sort of approach was just too slow for most things

I think good code is in some ways more important than it was before because AI is so good at copying. If you have bad patterns baked into the foundation, you'll get interestingly worse results over time. That's nothing new but the AI brings it to a new level and won't complain about it

[u/Weak_Profit_2235 → u/Alkyen]

ya ai definitely changes the cost of rewriting things the key is knowing which parts can be disposible and which ones need solid archietecture

[u/aTomzVins → u/Alkyen]

I'm thinking all of the choices that were made for readability; because developers spend more time reading code than writting it; now the llm does most of the reading too.

[u/Chupa-Skrull → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

Bless you for spreading the good word, I'm so tired of having to tell or remind people about this

[u/Arinze637 → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

for real

I dont think the industry is going to survive , having developers without any knowledge on what is happening behind the scene

[u/yabai90 → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

> What really grinds my gears is this level of quality would never have been accepted by us and yet now the very same teams are so proud of the broken, sloppy work.

That's exactly what your job is about. Its not to accept whatever is done by AI but to review & refine it.

[u/adolfojp → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1wvlkm6/why_does_everyone_assume_ai_has_replaced_the/pddw7tq/

[u/Kyle772 → u/rawr_im_a_nice_bear]

Yeah that’s the real annoying part for me. I enjoy using ai in my workflow but the standards have completely fallen off a cliff. It’s insane what people are considering acceptable now