Link tags: debt

Vibe code is legacy code | Val Town Blog

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It’s only legacy code if you have to maintain it!

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt.

If you don’t understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web – Web Performance and Site Speed Consultant

If I was only able to give one bit of advice to any company: iterate quickly on a slow-moving platform.

Excellent advice from Harry (who first cast his pearls before the swine of LinkedIn but I talked him ‘round to posting this on his own site).

1. Opt into web platform features incrementally
2. Embrace progressive enhancement to build fast, reliable applications that adapt to your customers’ context
3. Write code that leans into the browser, not away from it

I’m not against front-end frameworks, and, believe me, I’m not naive enough to believe that the only thing a front-end framework provides is soft navigations, but if you’re going to use one, I shouldn’t be able to smell it.

Removing React is just weakness leaving your codebase — Begin Blog

The web is backward and forward compatible. Anything you learn about HTML, CSS and browser API’s will serve you well for the next 25 years, which is not something you can say about the current fashion in JavaScript libraries. By ejecting from the thrash of React and other heavy-handed frameworks and doubling down on web fundamentals, you’ll be future-proofing both your career and your codebases.

Classic rock, Mario Kart, and why we can’t agree on Tailwind - Josh Collinsworth blog

I suspect most people on opposing sides of the Tailwind debate actually complete agree on Tailwind itself. I don’t think we disagree on atomic CSS, or utility classes; I think our contention comes from the valuations we made long before we ever chose our tools. Where one of us sees a selling point, the other sees a flaw.

This is very much in line with what I’ve been talking about in my presentation on declarative design.

As Jeremy Keith put it so well: where it comes to styling, Builders want imperative programming; they want to specify what they want, where they want, how they want it. No surprises.

Crafters instead want declarative programming; they understand how to wield the power of creating rules of governance within a complex system, and wish to use that power, rather than micromanaging the browser.

Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React - Josh Collinsworth blog

I don’t think most people using React on a regular basis realize quite how much it’s fallen behind.

Following on from Josh’s earlier post where he said “React isn’t great at anything except being popular”, here are the details.

Every decision React’s made since its inception circa 2013 is another layer of tech debt—one that its newer contemporaries aren’t constrained by.

This is particularly damning:

No other modern frontend framework is as stubbornly incompatible with the platform as React is.

The good news:

React is a bit like a git branch that’s fallen well behind main. You might not realize it, if React is the star your galaxy orbits around, but…well, frontend has moved on. The ecosystem has taken those ideas and run with them to make things that are even better.

Responsible JavaScript: Part III – A List Apart

This chimes nicely with my recent post on third-party scripts. Here, Jeremy treats third-party JavaScript at technical debt and outlines some solutions to staying on top of it.

Convenience always has a price, and the web is wracked by our collective preference for it. JavaScript, in particular, is employed in a way that suggests a rapidly increasing tendency to outsource whatever it is that We (the first party) don’t want to do. At times, this is a necessary decision; it makes perfect financial and operational sense in many situations.

But make no mistake, third-party JavaScript is never cheap. It’s a devil’s bargain where vendors seduce you with solutions to your problem, yet conveniently fail to remind you that you have little to no control over the side effects that solution introduces.

A World We Built to Burn | emptywheel

The climate crisis as technical debt:

What we’re dealing with is hundreds of years of something that software world calls technical debt. Technical debt is the shortcuts and trade-offs engineers use to get something done either cheaper or in less time, which inevitably creates the need to fix systems later, often at great cost or difficulty.

Some technical debt is understood up front, some comes from builders being ignorant of the system they are working in. Most of our planet’s infrastructure is mired in huge amounts of technical debt, most of which we didn’t know we were signing up for at the time, some of which we’re just incurring recklessly as we go along, unable to face the scale of the problem and pushing it off on the next generation.

The Technical Debt Myth

In some cases, it’s entirely valid to explore new products and technologies, but in others, our striving for novelty becomes the driving factor for abandoning perfectly suitable solutions under the umbrella of technical debt.

Just because a technology is a few years old and possibly frustrating in some cases doesn’t mean you’re in technical debt. We need to stop projecting our annoyances as pitfalls of technological or design choices.

Dealing with Technical & Design Debt - Breakfast Session - Agile Swap Shop (Brighton, England) | Meetup

If you’re a project manager anywhere near Brighton, put this event in your calendar for the morning of May 30th.