“AI, make the website good”
Millions of Large-Language-Model-generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development. We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves).
I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize tooling improvements from software companies at the bleeding edge of technique and application and it usually goes something like this: “If we make it easier for developers to create software, they will have more bandwidth to produce higher quality software!”
I’m always left wondering (suspecting the answer with hopeful optimism that my hunch is wrong this time): do these workflow improvements actually improve how people (technical or otherwise) experience software? Certainly we have more software. But is it better? I don’t know.
Front-end web developers have lived through a few cycles of this (seven or eight years of client rendering, fifteen years of the single-page-application-era smokescreen are a few that come to mind), sold as though improvements to developer experience would cause the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan himself to ask you for commit access to ship trickle-down improvements to user experience.
Is this cycle repeating the same playbook (on a more accelerated pace)? Certainly we’ve seen numerous recent anecdotal examples of software becoming less reliable over time (GitHub is the most recent scapegoat I’ve seen, but on my read they seem to be a second-order victim more than anything).
(Seems like a great time to be in the Monitoring/Status Page business).
With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as caring about the quality of output (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is more important than ever. Caring about what you ship will always have real-world value to visitors/consumers/users real people.
Prefers-reduced-motion respecting web performance filmstrips from the AI category on Speedlify, a category boasting a failing median Core Web Vitals score with 12 out of 13 sites failing Lighthouse performance and Axe accessibility checks.
Poster image by Alex Simpson
15 Comments
wow the thing that defaults to additive behavior makes bloat you don't say
at least we’re adding faster than ever
Lots of people “want to make software”, it’s almost not even a Venn Diagram when you also show the much smaller circle of people who “want to make good software”. 🫠
@zachleat A++++++++++++++ passive aggressive animations, would replay again
AI: *replaces four lines of semantic HTML with 80 megabytes of div soup, three hallucinated npm packages, and a loader that spins forever*
@zachleat Love the new compare feature. The filmstrip is very cool. It’s impressive to see new features added to what already began as a comprehensive resource. Any plans to add more sites to the comparison?
@pixelambacht *runs away screaming* 😅
@damianwalsh I didn’t apply filmstrips and comparisons to the Built Awesome category for resource (file size) reasons on the site. I think it’s possible to readd it back in at some point but I just want to take care there as this site does pressure GitHub’s free tier 😅
@zachleat I'm not saying this to absolve any of these companies but do you know if there is an available comparison for these sites for when you start using the different services? Anecdotally it always seems like the homepages are the worst offenders because that's were … Truncated
@McNeely ah, I don’t think I’m trying to make that point. The point I am trying to make here is that we aren’t at the level of automation that will craft good quality (and good quality is still important) but to your point, I don’t know! It doesn’t seem like that could be measur… Truncated
"Claude, make number go up."
Including bugs and outages 😭
The tell that AI is ultimately another automation tool is that to the end user, nothing much has changed. The user experience of five years ago is similar than to today. We had online chat back then too. A regular person wouldn’t perceive any difference now that AI is doing whate… Truncated
I think we should raise our standards
@zachleat I'm still believe that there are tasks for the AI and tasks for human that way. I'm still have projects with no AI entangled for the frontend design.