Not saying you're 100% wrong, but there are tons of markets where Uber is robust enough to rely on and get you where you need to go, and public transit absolutely is not. (I'm half an hour outside of Pittsburgh.)
It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.
I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.
Yeah everyone thinks its great at the things they don't personally know that much about or appreciate and I think it's kind of embarrassing to proclaim its going to do someone else's speciality great but not theirs and just reveals an underlying ignorance.
I'm solidly a generalist, I custom create designs for products and implement them, and also work on backends and large scale production ml systems. I would actually have to agree with the person you are replying to - simply because backends are text problems, (an LLMs domain), and frontends are visual - llms are just still not quite as good at seeing details as humans, whereas they can scan a large codebase for possible problems much faster than any human could. Both areas need careful supervision and feedback loops, adversarial reviews etc - but for the frontend, I find myself having to do much more manual work actually checking myself, because an llm just doesn't get symmetry if it doesn't perfectly correlate to margin being 16px on both sides of a box, etc, ie symmetry you can see in code. Or whether a design "feels" nice to look at, etc.
But with backend, you give it proper guidance to create tests, do benchmarking, follow sane design patterns, etc, and its very effective.
Honestly I think it's great at the things I do know about. I've been doing this stuff soup to nuts since javascript was released, and it's tactically better across the board - presentation, ux, frontend ui, api, backend, databases, even systems and devops.
It's taste can be atrocious, so we're not replacing engineers entirely yet, but it's clear that it's almost hands off for any task I would have done as a consultant in 2012, for example. And, contrary to my opinion a couple months ago, I think taste is a pretty shallow moat, ultimately. Many of my clients when I was operating a consultancy had plenty of taste, if that's all they required, and I think it'd be foolish to assume frontier models won't acquire taste eventually.
I do think that, ultimately, the tippy top of the pinnacle for things like truly original design work, truly original work of any kind, will take a long time to replace. But most software engineering isn't moving the boundaries of the possibilities of humanity, it's making sure that we can turn $0.10 of infra spend into $2 of revenue reliably.
Codex has been great for me for backend wiring, mapping and creating boiler plate code in C#. However, it seems when I go in to fix things its 60% front-end.
Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
> provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
The AI is not intelligent. Its really hard to grasp cleanly. But it can't do anything logically like we do. Its pattern matching. It has to be a pattern its seen; then it can assemble them. If there are competing patterns - it'll trip up being consistent. Long established libraries and languages that change the least, it'll be best at. Anything newer it'll be bad at - even with documentation. The only way out is to give it tests, then it can loop over several simpler problems, where the errors (failed tests) match well onto the more basic primitives that don't really change (wrong string, wrong type, wrong structure, etc)
At $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_COMPANY, I've found that if you have:
1) A designer that uses Figma correctly (using well defined components / design systems)
2) A front-end framework as close to HTML / CSS as possible for the visuals (I have success with Web Components / Lit) with Figma MCP
The front-end is usually one-shot using frontier models. However in my experience, designers are all over the place with using Figma correctly.
I agree with you. Maybe AI can generate designs that look moderately good and aesthetically pleasing for UIs that solve known problems in a prototypical way.[0] That is useful, especially for simple utilities, internal tools, or hobby projects. However, I have yet to see AI solve new design problems, improve on old problems, and create a unique design style that defines a brand and separates it from competition.
Most organisations need a high quality design system and to be able to assemble pages from it. Totally bespoke design will start with the designer using an agent. So the way I see it, the everyday stuff will be the first to go, followed by designers taking the rest of it. Front-end developers have their area eroded from the bottom then the top.
As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.
The frontend feedback is much harder for AI. AI needs to be able to see the page with all the moving parts and sounds and have a bit of sense for the layout and taste in colors etc. I think it much harder for AI to recognize what feels good for the human user.
Backend is devoid of that personal touch. By definition you are building for the machine. You have APIs, databases and infrastructure which is logical and easy for LLM to interact with. "All it needs" is curl and it can run in a loop the whole day improving backend software.
I think you’re conflating development and design there. I’m saying that development is at risk, I’m not commenting on design. Taste in colours and things like that are design.
I'm not. I really fail to see where do you see frontend development to be easier for AI to pick up compared to backend. As I said frontend is writing code for an user interface and backend for a machine interface.
Knowing that a white font is not visible on white background is not really a design job is it? Calling an API on the other hand requires mostly logic and documentation or do you disagree?
Forget AI exists for a moment. You’ve got a team of humans working on a project. You’ve got a backend developer, a frontend developer, a DBA, a platform engineer, a graphic designer, a UX person, a product manager, and a QA person.
Whose responsibility is it to select the colours? You think this is the responsibility of one of the developers‽ You don’t think “having taste in colours” is solidly owned by the designer‽ You think this is a developer task not a design task‽
Aside from that, the specific example you chose is an area where we have deterministic algorithms for judging contrast – we don’t even need AI for that, regular old procedural code can do it.
I'll second this, with the caveat that I've not yet tried to build anything with Fable.
Every engineer can now produce things in the front end that doesn't look like complete and utter garbage, sure, but everyone is also producing the new-era of Twitter Bootstrap pages. It all has the same touched-by-AI look and it might as well be customer kryptonite from everything I've experienced at my workplace with customer surveys and collaboration. It has raised the floor substantially for internal tools and admin pages though.
What is this news source? I've never heard of it before and there are no names associated with it on their site. Two of their social media links are broken. Their YouTube channel was only active for like a year, 4-5 years ago. It all feels strange.
Yeah I was gonna offer a similar hot take: in a world where government can have trillions, it's probably good on some level that some people have billions. Checks and balances.
If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence
Except billionaires are never on the side of the people. They functionally already own the US government, which is how they've been able to amass so much wealth while the rest of the world gets poorer and hotter.
They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.
- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.
- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.
This is asserting personhood or consciousness of LLMs by default in your phrasing and then warning me about the dangers of violating your assertion. You're making the same wager and mistake. There's no important difference, you have no evidence for LLMs being a "someone" any more than you do for a god existing. Warnings about made up things hold no weight.
No, I don't know. Maybe this exact reply is why you get the interactions you do though.
You perceive opposing viewpoints or poking holes in logic as "hating on you", which is playing the victim, followed by alluding to conspiratorial nonsense against you.
> There's no important difference, you have no evidence for LLMs being a "someone" any more than you do for a god existing.
Well... When I ask god if he exists he has never responded to me.
So I would argue that your "any more evidence" is off by several orders of magnitude.
These are the sorts of errors in logic that make me think that people have an undue amount of emotion to discuss the issue rationally. And that's probably why I get attacked.
But hey. Maybe it's something else? Maybe everyone is on their period?
Yes. I'm currently not convinced it can ever be so. So until I hear something convincing to the contrary, I believe no machine can be conscious / sentient unless mimicking human behavior. And if it mimics human behavior intentionally, I have to ask why - and the answer is probably to get me to trust / use it more.
I was bright-eyed and excited about tech once. Like back in 1982 when I got my first home computer and thought CPUs were part magic. Now I know how machines work from the transistor level up to neural nets. There's nothing magical about it. And no consciousness.
Having seen the mockery that the finance-bros have made of "pure tech" (i.e. Jobs instead of Woz, Ellison instead of Joy, etc) and all the enshittification just for pure $$$, I'm leery of ANYTHING ANY tech company tells me anymore.
Now, do I believe that possibly "consciousness" is some kind of state of a super-circuit (our brains)? Sure. Can we emulate that on a computer? We can't even emulate a pebble on a computer (not simulate, emulate). We can SIMULATE what we THINK brains are, but we can't emulate a real one. Not even close, not for many decades.
I tend to agree with OP. In my opinion conscious machines are not something that we should allow to exist. If they do, they are not human and must never be treated as such.
I am not even slightly religious, but they would be abomination.
inhumane: without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel
cruel: willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or feeling no concern about it
You cannot treat an LLM inhumanely, definitionally.
Anyways, when one swears at someone it's typically meant to berate or belittle that person - to inflict some sort of emotional pain. That's the sense I intended when using the word, which is why it fits as a response to what you're saying, and why I would say "don't be nasty to a LLM" has little to do with the LLM itself.
>What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too.
Apple isn't _quite_ Coke, but they have a similar dynamic because they can deliver quality at a scale that makes them cost-competitive. They do exist in upscale market segments, but it doesn't define them as a company. They don't artificially keep the costs of Mac Studio sales low to drive demand.
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