this post was submitted on 06 May 2025

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The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind. (alex.party)

submitted 2 weeks ago by exu@feditown.com to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[–] Maxxie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 91 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

(let me preach a little, I have to listen to my boss gushing about AI every meeting)

Compare AI tools: now vs 3 years ago. All those 2022 "Prompt engineer" courses are totally useless in 2025.

Extrapolate into the future and realize, that you're not losing anything valuable by not learning AI tools today. The whole point of them is they don't require any proficiency. It "just works".

Instead focus on what makes you a good developer: understanding how things work, which solution is good for what problem, centering your divs.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Key skill is to be able to communicate your problem and requirements which turns out to be really hard.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It’s also a damn useful skill whether you’re working with AI or humans. Probably worth investing some effort into that regardless of what the future holds.

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[–] cjk@discuss.tchncs.de 80 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

As an old fart you can’t imagine how often I heard or read that.

[–] caseyweederman@lemmy.ca 53 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You should click the link.

[–] cjk@discuss.tchncs.de 39 points 2 weeks ago

Hehe. Damn, absolutely fell for it. Nice 😂

[–] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah but it's different this time!

[–] andioop@programming.dev 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

I do wonder about inventions that actually changed the world or the way people do things, and if there is a noticeable pattern that distinguishes them from inventions that came and went and got lost to history, or that did get adopted but do not have mass adoption. Hindsight is 20/20, but we live in the present and have to make our guesses about what will succeed and what will fail, and it would be nice to have better guesses.

[–] Lightfire228@pawb.social 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Quality work will always need human craftsmanship

I'd wager that most revolutionary technologies are either those that expand human knowledge and understanding, and (to a lesser extent) those that increase replicability (like assembly lines)

[–] Transtronaut@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It's tricky, because there's no hard definition for what it means to "change the world", either. To me, it brings to mind technologies like the Internet, the telephone, aviation, or the steam engine. In those cases, it seems like the common thread is to enable us to do something that simply wasn't possible before, and is also reliably useful.

To me, AI fails on both those points. It doesn't really enable us to do anything new. We already had chat bots, we already had Photoshop, we already had search algorithms and auto complete. It can do some of those things a lot more quickly than older technologies, but until they solve the hallucination problems it doesn't seem reliable enough to be consistently useful.

These things make it come off more as a potential incremental improvement that is still too early in it's infancy, than as something truly revolutionary.

[–] zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 weeks ago

Well it’ll change the world by consuming a shit ton of electricity and using even more precious water to fill the data centres. So changing the world is correct in that regard.

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[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

I'd love to read a list of those instances/claims/tech

I imagine one of them was low-code/no-code?

/edit: I see such a list is what the posted link is about.

I'm surprised there's not low-code/no-code in that list.

[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago

"We're gonna make a fully functioning e-commerce website with only this WYSIWYG site builder. See? No need to hire any devs!"

Several months later...

"Well that was a complete waste of time."

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[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 68 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Remember when "The Cloud" was going to put everyone in IT out of a job?

[–] Rusty@lemmy.ca 26 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I don't think it was supposed to replace everyone in IT, but every company had system administrators or IT administrators that would work with physical servers and now there are gone. You can say that the new SRE are their replacement, but it's a different set of skills, more similar to SDE than to system administrators.

[–] MinFapper@startrek.website 8 points 2 weeks ago

And some companies (like mine) just have their SDEs do the SRE job as well. Apparently it incentivizes us to write more stable code or something

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[–] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 18 points 2 weeks ago

Naming it "The Cloud" and not "Someone else's old computer running in their basement" was a smart move though.

It just sounds better.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 17 points 2 weeks ago

Many of our customers store their backups in our "cloud storage solution".

I think they'd be rather less impressed to see the cloud is in fact a jumble of PCs scattered all around our office.

[+] elrecoal19_1@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

There is still difference.

Cloud was FOR the IT people. Machine learning is for predicting patterns following data.

Maybe stock predictors will adapt or replace but average programmer didn't have to switch to replit because it's "cloud IDE"

[–] Ferk@programming.dev 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I mean, isn't that what "get on or get left behind" means?

It does not necessarily mean you'll lose your job. Nor does "get on" mean you have to become a specialist on it.

The post picks specifically on things that didn't catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.

[–] superkret@feddit.org 48 points 2 weeks ago

This technology solves every development problem we have had. I can teach you how with my $5000 course.

Yes, I would like to book the $5000 Silverlight course, please.

[–] bappity@lemmy.world 29 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

glorified autocomplete

[–] sidelove@lemmy.world 20 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Which is honestly its best use case. That and occasionally asking it to generate a one-liner for a library call I don't feel like looking up. Any significant generation tends to go off the rails fast.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

Getting it to format documentation for you seems to work a treat. Nothing too complex, just "move this bit here, split that into points".

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[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 29 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I still think PWAs are a good idea instead of needing to download an app on your phone for every website. Like, for example, PWAs can easilly replace most banking apps, which are already just PWAs with added tracking.

[–] Deebster 15 points 2 weeks ago

They're great for users, which is why Google and Apple are letting them die from lack of development so apps can make them money.

[–] teodorista@lemm.ee 26 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Thanks for summing it up so succinctly. As an aging dev, I've seen quite a lot of tech come and go. I wish more people interested in technology would spend more time learning the basics and the history of things.

[–] PlantPowerPhysicist@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

it's funny, but also holy moly do I not trust a "sign in with github" button

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[–] shiroininja@lemmy.world 20 points 2 weeks ago

Good thing I hate web development

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I'm skeptical of author's credibility and vision of the future, if he has not even reached blink tag technology in his progress.

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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

No one can predict the future. One way or the other.

The best way to not be let behind is to be flexible about whatever may come.

[–] rodbiren@midwest.social 9 points 2 weeks ago

Can't predict the future, but I can see the past. Specifically the part of the past that used standards based implementations and boring technology. Love that I can pull up html with elements using ALL CAPs and table aligned content. It looks like a hot mess but it still works, even on mobile. Plain text keeps trucking along. Sqlite will outlive me. Exciting things are exciting but the world is made of boring.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 weeks ago

10/10. No notes.

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It pains me so much when I see my colleagues pay OpenAI to do programming assignments.. they see it is faster to ask gpt, than learn it properly. Sadly, I can say nothing to them, or I would risk worsening relations with them.

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm glad they do. This is going to generate so much work opportunities to undo their messes.

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Except that they are research students in PhD course, it would exacerbate code messiness in research paper codebases.

[–] massive_bereavement@fedia.io 12 points 2 weeks ago

Or open source projects..

[–] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 10 points 2 weeks ago

You should probably click the link

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you're not using Notepad, I don't even know what to tell you.

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[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

What the fuck is Silverlight

[–] Giloron@programming.dev 18 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Microsoft Flash. Netflix used it for a while. I don't remember anything else using it.

[–] MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

A bunch of Disney movie sites did for a while, back in the day when every movie had it's own website with trailers, promo, and a link to buy tickets and/or the DVD release.

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[–] a_baby_duck@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The League of Legends launcher used it at one point. Not sure if it still does.

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