I think being simultaneously curious and skeptical of new technology is healthy attitude to have.
I concur.
I want to learn new things in order to keep making good websites. I also think there’s a lot of value in talking about the difficulty in learning new things.
Generated code is rather a lot like fast fashion: it looks all right at first glance but it doesn’t hold up over time, and when you look closer it’s full of holes. Just like fast fashion, it’s often ripped off other people’s designs. And it’s a scourge on the environment.
This is depressing.
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking – with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions – into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.
That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer’s IP address). And it’s the hard part when they’re prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.
The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.
Can you ship AI-generated code without creating a maintenance nightmare six months from now? Can you debug it when it breaks? Can you modify it when requirements change? Can you onboard new engineers to a codebase they didn’t write and the AI barely explained?
Most teams haven’t realized this shift yet. They’re optimizing for code generation speed while comprehension debt silently accumulates in their repos.
One team I talked to spent 3 days fixing what should have been a 2-hour problem. They had “saved” time by having AI generate the initial implementation. But when it broke, they lost 70 hours trying to understand code they had never built themselves.
That’s comprehension debt compounding. The time you save upfront gets charged back with interest later.
Products of all kinds are required to ensure misuse is discouraged, at a minimum, if not difficult or impossible. I don’t see why LLMs should be any different.
Whether you’re generating slop or code, underneath it’s the same shoggoth with a smiley face.
I’m trying to be open to changing my mind when presented with new evidence.
Why I get more excited about new CSS features and JavaScript APIs than I do about new frameworks, libraries, or build tools.
Balancing the ledger.
The importance of revisiting past decisions. Especially when it comes to the web.