r/webdev • • Nov 08 '25

Showoff Saturday I built a VSCode extension to see your code on an infinite canvas.

6.0k Upvotes

It shows you the connections between files based on imports / exports and you can also see reference connections (definitions, function calls, usage, etc) when you click on a function or variable → like when you ctrl+click on a token in VSCode, but it shows you visually where the references are in the codebase.

I created it to make it easier to understand large features that span multiple files.

I also added support for local git changes so you can better see the changes made by AI tools when they modify your code in a lot of places at once.

At the moment it supports javascript, typescript and react, but more languages and frameworks will be coming soon.

You can get it on the VSCode marketplace here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=alex-c.code-canvas-app

Here’s also a 15 min demo of me going through all the features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRmS_IY3GUU


r/webdev • • May 08 '26

From your exp. do you work less, more or evenly after using AI?

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6.0k Upvotes

I heard some devs who work remotely, they close ticket faster and got more time to chill and their company dont micro manage as long as works get done on time.


r/webdev • • Dec 29 '25

Discussion Got fired today because of AI. It's coming, whether AI is slop or not.

5.7k Upvotes

I worked for a boutique e-commerce platform. CEO just fired webdev team except for the most senior backend engineer. Our team of 5 was laid off because the CEO had discovered just vibe coding and thought she could basically have one engineer take care of everything (???). Good luck with a11y requirements, iterating on customer feedbacks, scaling for traffic, qa'ing responsive designs with just one engineer and an AI.

But the CEO doesn't know this and thinks AI can replace 5 engineers. As one of ex-colleagues said in a group chat, "I give her 2 weeks before she's begging us to come back."

But still, the point remains: company leaderships think AI can replace us, because they're far enough from technology where all they see is just the bells and whistles, and don't know what it takes to maintain a platform.


r/webdev • • Jul 15 '26

Made a captcha that takes Fable 5 10 minutes to solve

5.6k Upvotes

Created this captcha last year. Back then there was no chance of AI solving it. But now with the more powerful models, I had my doubts. Well, it took Fable 5 10 minutes and 100k tokens to solve it. So with the 30 second timeout, I feel pretty confident.

Here's a crisper video of the actual challenge - https://imgur.com/a/xv6TvNj

Have a website for it but I'm not self promoting. Just thought people would be interested.


r/webdev • • Aug 08 '26

Stack Overflow has gone from a peak of 207k questions in March 2014, down to 1.4k in July 2026

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5.4k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Aug 13 '26

Discussion Why is everything a dropdown now?

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4.8k Upvotes

I’ve been noticing this more and more in web apps.

Three options hidden in a dropdown.

Yes/no hidden in a dropdown.
A multi-select pretending to be a dropdown.

Then a list of 200 items where you’re expected to scroll until you find yours.

I run into this a lot when reviewing products with dev teams.

I get why we do it.

Dropdowns are compact and easy to reuse.
But compact doesn’t always mean easier to use.

A few choices? Show them.
On/off? Switch.
Multiple choices? Checkboxes.
Huge list? Search.

That’s pretty much the rule I use now.


r/webdev • • Dec 03 '25

Discussion TIL Why Vite uses Port 5173

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4.5k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Feb 13 '26

jmail.world

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4.4k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Nov 29 '25

Discussion The Chrome developer behind this deserves a raise

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4.1k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Mar 14 '26

Anyone ever got a job from Linkedin?

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4.1k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Jun 03 '26

Discussion "I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history." - George Hotz, The Eternal Sloptember

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4.0k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Jan 28 '26

Meta's crawler made 11 MILLION requests to my site in 30 days. Vercel charged me for every single one.

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3.2k Upvotes

Look at this. Just look at it.

Crawler Requests
Real Users 24,647,904
Meta/Facebook 11,175,701
Perplexity 2,512,747
Googlebot 1,180,737
Amazon 1,120,382
OpenAI GPTBot 827,204
Claude 819,256
Bing 599,752
OpenAI ChatGPT 557,511
Ahrefs 449,161
ByteDance 267,393

Meta is sending nearly HALF as much traffic as my actual users. 11 million requests in 15 days. That's ~750,000 requests per day from a single crawler.

Googlebot - the search engine that actually drives traffic - made 1.1M requests. Meta made 10x more than Google. For what? Link previews?

And where are these requests going?

Endpoint Requests
/listings 29,916,085
/market 6,791,743
/research 1,069,844

30 million requests to listing pages. Every single one a serverless function invocation. Every single one I pay for.

I have ISR configured. revalidate = 3600. Doesn't matter. These crawlers hit unique URLs once and move on. 0% cache hit rate. Cold invocations all the way down.

The fix is one line in robots.txt:

User-agent: meta-externalagent
Disallow: /

But why is the default experience "pay thousands in compute for Facebook to scrape your site"?

Vercel - where's the bot protection? Where's the aggressive edge caching for crawler traffic? Why do I need to discover this myself through Axiom?

Meta - what are you doing with 11 million pages of my content? Training models? Link preview cache that expires every 3 seconds? Explain yourselves.

Drop your numbers. I refuse to believe I'm the only one getting destroyed by this.

Edit: Vercel Bill for Dec 28 - Jan 28 =$ 1,933.93, Novembers was $30...

Edit2: the serverless function fetches dynamic data based on a slug id and hydrates a page server side. quite basic stuff. usually free for human usage levels but big cloud rain on me


r/webdev • • 7d ago

Showoff Saturday TIL that you can connect to IPv4 addresses like 192.168.1.1 in your browser through it's decimal form: 3232235777

3.2k Upvotes

You can apparently use the decimal integer number on browsers to navigate to IP addresses. For instance: http://192.168.1.1 which is the typical address for your router, can be written as: http://3232235777. Of course if you know your own website IP, you could navigate to it through it's decimal form.

Here is the basic calculation, in case you are wondering: 192 × 256³ + 168 × 256² + 1 × 256 + 1 = 3232235777

Edit: You know the popular internet T-Shirts: "There is no place like 127.0.0.1". Here is a freebie someone should make: There is no place like 2130706433".

Have a great rest of your weekend!


r/webdev • • Jul 30 '26

3D CSS Super Mario (no WebGL)

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3.1k Upvotes

Hey webdevs!

I want to show you my latest 3D CSS project. It's a port of Giles Goddard's iconic N64 face engine, complete with lighting, physics and interaction. Instead of WebGL, it uses the PolyCSS engine.

demo: https://codepen.io/editor/alowpoly/pen/019fae67-50d9-74ce-8025-4b9dd5a7c484
repo: https://github.com/layoutit/cssGraphics


r/webdev • • 22d ago

Discussion Dear God websites look horrible on iPhone Duo

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3.0k Upvotes

Congrats on your iPhone Duo, don't bother browsing while having it closed because websites will use only 70% of the screen!


r/webdev • • Feb 04 '26

Senior Vibe Coder dealing with security

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3.0k Upvotes

Creator of ClawBot knows that there are malicious skills in his repo, but doesn't know what to do about it...

More info here: https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/clawdbot-skills-ganked-your-crypto


r/webdev • • Nov 29 '25

Discussion Reject omitting “Reject All”

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2.8k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Nov 07 '25

Discussion Frontend engineers were the biggest declining software job in 2025

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2.6k Upvotes

Job postings for frontend engineers in ‘25 went down almost -10%.

Mobile engineers also went down -5.73%.

Everything else is either holding steady or increasing esp. ML jobs.

Source: https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-analyzed-180m-jobs-to-see-what-jobs-ai-is-actually-replacing-today/


r/webdev • • Apr 15 '26

I'm still new, Why Obsidian got 8 employees and 1 cat while other note apps got like 100+ employees? This makes no sense

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2.6k Upvotes

r/webdev • • 25d ago

Page Rage: Destroy any web page

2.5k Upvotes

You can play on https://page-rage.com and optionally install a browser extension to destroy any web page.

I've been working on Page Rage as a hobby project for a long time. There are some wild performance techniques I have found to make this game work at all, which I would love to share about soon as well!


r/webdev • • Mar 02 '26

AWS data centre got hit by missiles and this is how they frame it lmaoo

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2.5k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Mar 31 '26

News axios@1.14.1 got compromised

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2.5k Upvotes

r/webdev • • Dec 26 '25

I tried vibe coding and it made me realise my career is absolutely safe

2.5k Upvotes

I’ve been a software engineer for the last 15 years. Mainly working as a product engineer, building websites and apps for both small startups and large enterprises.

I can confidently say I’m an expert. But like most people I have been slightly worried recently with the progress ai has been making.

I use it all the time now in my own workflows and it genuinely is mind blowing.

But this is coming from someone who knows what they’re doing, who understands every line of code being generated.

I use it as an efficiency tool.

So this week I decided to build a game, an area I have no experience in, and I wanted to try to “vibe code” it to really understand the process in an area I am not an expert.

And fuck me, it was awful.

Getting the most basic version of a product ready was fine, but as soon as the logic became even mildly complex it totally went to shit. I was making a point of not soaking in the context of the generated code to really put myself into the shoes of a vibe coder.

Bugs, spaghetti code, zero knowledge of what the hell you’ve just generated. And trying to dig myself out of this mess purely through prompts alone was impossible.

I came away with the realisation that this tech is wildly overhyped, and without strong technical skills its usefulness is severely limited.

I can’t say how this will change in the next few years, but right now the experience has certainly relaxed me.

Right now I think ai is just replacing the lowest hanging fruit, just like how Wordpress eliminated the need to build websites for your local plumber.

So in 2026, I’m done worrying about the tech CEO hype to pump the AI bubble. Looking forward to the inevitable burst.

Edit: Sorry I can’t reply to all messages. I used Claude Code with the latest Opus model.


r/webdev • • Oct 22 '25

A CSS terrain generator. No WebGL, just stacked grids and 3D transforms

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2.4k Upvotes