A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML

https://davidpoblador.com/deep-dives/the-descent/

by nirvanis • 23 days ago

68 43 23 days ago

davidpoblador.com

poly2it• 23 days ago

For some reason I find Claude's writing often has an oddly condescending tone when it tries to be empathetic.

dpritchett• 23 days ago

I imagine they're going for avuncular but a lot of us as adult engineers receive it as patronizing.

nhod• 23 days ago

“Every tool is scar tissue over a real wound. Follow the wounds, and the map draws itself. THE ONE IDEA THAT UNLOCKS EVERYTHING” uh-huh

I have noticed myself having a visceral reaction to the AI tells now, somewhere between disgust and anger. And I am not an angry man and I like AI! There is just something about the voice that is incredibly off-putting, like a know-it-all friend who just ripped a giant fart. It is annoyingly correct and also smells really bad.

yulker2• 23 days ago

I don't know how else to put it, but it has this built in condescension that rides along when someone is hitting you with too many clever metaphors. Like it's TED talking at you or something, it just frames everything in a tone of authoritative/lecturing style. Very off putting just as if an actual person did it you would feel irritated by them

JimDabell2• 23 days ago

It sounds like an overly earnest TEDx talker leaning over you talking about something inconsequential as if it’s the most mic-droppingly insightful thing in the world.

Zababa2• 23 days ago

Claude in general is condescending and often assumes it knows better than you.

Tade0• 23 days ago

To me it bears similarities to the writings of Rebecca Hazelton:

https://rebeccahazelton.com/

memjay2• 23 days ago

Reading this hurt so much. Please just write articles by hand. I don’t care about perfect grammar and I don’t care about your article sounding „native“ or not.

But I do care about not having to read the word „genuinely“ a hundred times just because Claude likes it so much.

yulker2• 23 days ago

I'm having a similar reaction, and I wonder if because this style, tone, and tics are what I'm encountering while using AI tools, I instantly get a bad taste in my mouth when I see it in the context of something that's supposed to be written by a person. Like I reflexively discount it the moment I see its staccato little stylish flourishes and the same handful of "scar tissue" type analogies it seems to like to trot out again and again.

Retr0id• 23 days ago

Oh. I assumed an article that references hand-writing things would be hand written. Silly me :(

mhitza• 23 days ago

I don't think only their writing is AI, I suspect the site as well. With modern frontend GenAI renditions it is more common for me to find sites that stutter during scroll, as this site does.

camillomiller2• 23 days ago

Not a suspect, it's a certainty.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-des...

mbreese• 23 days ago

This reads like the transcript of an AI YouTube video that is trying to make it to 8 minutes for an ad roll.

My_Name• 23 days ago

I just used the modern method for articles like that.

I read the headlines, skimmed the prose that has no purpose other than 'it was what the AI put out', then read the conclusion.

Similarly, I skip video content where the title is something like "How to get better fuel economy for your car" and the video starts "Let's investigate the entire history of wheels", and the whole video could just be a guy sat in a chair saying "keep your tyres at the correct pressure"

memjay2• 23 days ago

You are right, it feels like clickbait for blog posts / articles.

And once you notice the bait (via telltale signs) you feel betrayed. Betrayed for your attention, thoughts and time.

ufmace• 23 days ago

I'd summarize the concept as, this youtube video could have been a tweet

xtiansimon• 23 days ago

“I skip video content where the title…”

I skip anything where a talking head says, “here’s the thing”, or “what they don’t want you to know”.

sixtyj• 23 days ago

But OP (or LLM) is sort of funny :)

Now a beginner's tutorial opens with sixteen tools you've never heard of, half of them named after Japanese words for "fast," and the first command downloads more code than the Apollo guidance computer ran on, just to render a contact form.

After finishing the post, yes OP was funny, at the beginning only unfortunately. The rest of text is so LLMish that it hurts.

The beginning was promising…

camillomiller2• 23 days ago

THIS THIS THIS THIS AND THIS.

I was GENUINELY (ha, see what I did there?) interested and started reading, only to immediately understand that no human sweat was spent in writing what I was reading.

The result is that within 2 minutes I went from "fantastic, just what I needed" to "fuck, no way I'm spending my time reading this, considering it's probably hallucinating parts that could not work as described". It doesn't matter if text is perfect, it's the "vibe of the vibe" that just puts me off. Plus, the design SCREAMS Claude Code.

So, to everyone who does or thinks of doing what the author of this text did, a pledge:

PLEASE, take time to implement your ideas. That's what gives them value. Nobody forces you to produce this slop nor to implement your ideas, even if you think it's the best in the world.

If you do, and you think that shortcutting like this equals being productive, you are sorely delusional. You are producing slop, and you are only contributing to noise. And if you do that in the hope that something produced this way might eventually take off in a game of large numbers, well you're just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it might stick. All of it will still be shit.

p4bl0• 23 days ago

This is too oddly written to read in its entirety and I don't get the point. I mostly still do things like it says it worked in 2008. The difference with the "modern" workflow with 1400 packages and a build system is that web pages I put online just work, unlike most modern website which are horribly bug ridden and take ages to load and render.

coldtea• 23 days ago

This is too oddly written to read in its entirety

It's AI slop.

alwa• 23 days ago

They had me at “scar tissue grown over a real wound.”

stephenlf• 23 days ago

I enjoyed the read. Thank you.

adithyassekhar• 23 days ago

Too much text to explain to people who don’t need that much explaining. That’s the telltale sign of ai writing (ai intended).

sublinear• 23 days ago

Very much worth pointing out that while this is a fair history lesson of the entire toy chest, you still don't have to do any/all of this.

Contrary to popular belief, even big corporate web dev projects for high profile clients can still be, and often are, just plain HTML and CSS. The design does most of the heavy lifting. This is especially true for anything related to marketing.

Zababa2• 23 days ago

Not a prescription, a starting buffet. These are popular, well-supported defaults, not the only right answers. Tap any tool to open its site.

These AI tells are getting really easy to notice. A negative that absolutely isn't needed in a sentence, and you know it's AI that wrote it (, not a human ;) ).

_3u10• 23 days ago

Server side rendering on a serverless platform is all you need to know about “modern” front ends.

mdrzn• 23 days ago

Another AI slop article.

"the generated code quietly assumes you know everything in the eight layers above"

chr15m2• 23 days ago

We need the exact opposite of this.

tantalor3• 23 days ago

Do you mean "this" as in 1. the story this website is telling, 2. the website itself, or 3. all the tech in the story

chr15m2• 23 days ago

I mean we need "a field guide to hand-written HTML for the modern front end developer."

Brendinooo• 23 days ago

People are focused on the authorship of the prose so I'll offer something different: imo this correctly covers the steps of the evolution of modern frontend and explains the reasoning well.

A lot of people on this site complain about modern tooling but this stuff wasn't done for kicks. React (and npm, I think) was (were) _so good_ at solving the problems it solved that we were willing to deal with the fallout.

Now that we're back to consolidating all of the gains through server side rendering, I think we're in a much better place overall.

combatentropy• 23 days ago

I was wondering what anybody thought of a library I wrote a few years ago: https://www.combatentropy.com/tools/cobblestone/

Many sites could be built on the stack espoused by Alex Petros, "The Hundred-Year Web Service", <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lASLZ9TgXyc>: SQLite, Express.js, Nunjucks, and HTMX.

But if your app needs islands of interactivity, my library does it in a way that I haven't seen elsewhere.

JimDabell2• 23 days ago

In 2008 you saved a file called index.html, dragged it onto an FTP client, and watched a little progress bar crawl to the right.

When I was first learning web development in the 90s, after a couple of sites, I switched to a hosting provider that offered a bit more control over the hosting environment. I discovered that they supported SCP and SFTP but not FTP. When I asked them why, they told me it was because FTP was old and insecure. I dig a bit of digging to learn about the situation, and sure enough, FTP was 25+ years old already and literally a decade older than the Internet (FTP: 1971; TCP/IP: 1981) and was obsolete and much less secure than the modern alternatives available in the late 90s.

This was a full decade before “the olden times” of 2008 that the article talks about, so using FTP even back then was a massively outdated way of working.

ashleyn• 23 days ago

I writhe in pain when I try to find a frontend dev guide for a newbie to learn off, and one of the later chapters is some shit like setting up a kubernetes cluster

tantalor3• 23 days ago

[Metapost] Can we unflag this? It's a good resource and shouldn't be suppressed just because some people don't like the tone.

nirvanis• 23 days ago

Hi, OP here. Thanks for this.

I don’t seem to have cracked the Hacker News writing formula yet. A few years ago I got similar feedback, but for the opposite reason: people complained that my English felt awkward because I’m not a native speaker. This time I asked an LLM to smooth out the wording, and it seems I accidentally outsourced my personality too.

The content and research are mine. I spent a few hours trying to collect all the moving pieces into something I wish I’d had as someone returning to frontend after many years away. It was just meant to save a few fellow dinosaurs from opening 47 tabs and wondering why they suddenly need seven package managers.

rubinlinux• 23 days ago

I work with claude every day, and instantly recognized its voice; but at the same time, as a web dev from the late 90s who traveled kicking and screaming through all of these ages, I really enjoyed the article anyway. I don't have a visceral disgust with claude's tone as some others here seem to. I'm glad you wrote it and I plan to share it with a friend.

re• 23 days ago

Like others here, the content is something that I'm interested in, but I too have a reaction to the LLM-isms. I think part of it is that, once I recognize I'm reading LLM output, I have no way of knowing if it wrote the whole post based on a one-or-two sentence prompt or not, and if it did, how much can I really trust the output to not be hallucinated. If I'm going to read LLM output, I'd rather do so in the context of my own chat with it so I can understand the inputs to it and ask follow-up questions.

Can you put the pre-LLM version of your post on your site somewhere? I (and presumably many others) would be much more interested in reading that, even if the English is a bit awkward.

hyperhello• 23 days ago

I wish I had a better way to communicate that I loved this article. I just took a Software Engineering Methods class that just should have been this article. Don’t listen to people complain your AI use is ruining their lives; their contribution is less than yours.

tapete1• 22 days ago

You will never write something that everyone likes. And furthermore, writing a quality text is _hard_, as in, that is something that even a native speaker will have to practice several years.

"There's a Gap that for the first couple years that you're making stuff what you're making isn't so good. it's not that great it's it's really not that great it's it's trying to be good it has ambition to good but it's not quite that good but your taste - the thing that got you into the game - your your taste is still killer and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of bad."

https://youtu.be/X2wLP0izeJE

add-sub-mul-div• 23 days ago

No, there's no reason for slop to be posted here. If we wanted it we could just generate it ourselves.

A field guide to the modern front end for developers who hand-wrote HTML

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