3 ms·

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediat

by m132 4mo ago

The problem is, mastering accessibility, intuitiveness, compatibility, responsiveness, scalability, architecture, performance, and all those other less immediately visible, "forward-thinking" parts of UX/software development has always been difficult. Ultra high-level frameworks and now LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP. The gap between "acceptable" and "decent" has thus been widening. As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". And the push is understandable as well, it's MVPs that make money and details only "increase customer satisfaction" at best (and these days, who even cares about customers?). The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality, maybe even job satisfaction in general. As an (unfortunately anecdotal) example, I started to find myself fixing up broken websites or removing elements that get in the way with dev tools and uBlock every once in a while, and have heard from other people on here that they have been doing the same (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042747). All to restore basic functionality of websites I go on. This was never required back in the day, Flash and early web browsers didn't even have the option to do this. Another, less anecdotal example from a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 It gets worse when you realize that most of the money saved through these cuts only benefits the very top of the hierarchy.

hnthrow0287345 4mo ago
This is why the 'craft' should be left to open source for most commercial software. The business reality just doesn't care for it. Only when you have a PR problem does the business switch back to signalling quality, like Microsoft, although it remains to be seen if they still have the quality part. Most of the craftspeople get to say 'told you so' but also it looks like a sinking ship to them. Once the PR problem is gone, it's back to shipping at the expense of quality. This cycle conflicts with the idea of a craft, which is that you should do it that way all/most of the time. The business will stop caring about quality long enough that your skills will erode, making it a bad mix. Trying to practice a craft where you aren't in control of this cycle is corrosive to the spirit.
hombre_fatal 4mo ago
> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend. The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for things that you weren't going to spend time caring about anyways and, more importantly, (2) you can encode these things into prompts (AGENTS.md) and processes so that they happen even when you weren't going to invest the time with or without AI. For a lot of people this only means collecting some generic "skills" they found online yet it's still much better than what they were going to do pre-AI. That's why I think AI is saving software in some ways, not leading to worse software. Or, asserting that AI will botch software might hold more weight with people who have already forgotten how dogshit software was pre-AI.
- m132 4mo ago
  I can somewhat see your point, but it is generally accepted that a wrong ARIA is worse than none, and LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing, the more decent ones heavily emphasize in-depth human code reviews. If our hypothetical developer hasn't used any accessibility-related tags before, what chance is there that those parts of the website will receive adequate testing?
  - PaulHoule 4mo ago
    0% if by testing you mean "somebody who uses a screen reader regularly was able to use the product successfully" because nobody seems to do that.
  - hombre_fatal 4mo ago
    Testing is an even more powerful subject here since we barely do it. Testing is so hard that we'll agree that, e.g., TDD is great (e.g. ensure your tests actually test something, ensure your code is testable from the start) yet we never do it. And when we do write tests, we are on the hook to be eternally vigilant that they are not stale, that they test something real, that they are not redundant. And they often turn into an append-only file that you resent. Meanwhile, AI is happy to write tests, do red-green TDD cycles, refactor them, prune them, update them, justify and defend them. It will even incidentally write tests for the most aloof vibe-coder by accident because they didn't specify otherwise. Overnight, I went from never testing most of my side projects (except for, say, maybe unit tests in more straightforward things like a parser) to now everything is tested end-to-end. Every time I make a new directional / architectural decision, the tests the AI writes also encode it at the test level to reenforce the decision. It's strictly a better world for software because AI can write and maintain tests. > LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing But tests also help humans and ensure human-written software is robust. We only don't test because they are so costly to write and maintain, and our software has always suffered for it. Or the tests become such an unmaintainable mess that our software is now worse because of it!
carlosjobim 4mo ago
> As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem? > The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality If you have 10 people eating steak and 10 people starving, then giving rice to the starving people would also sharply decrease dinner quality. AI software is not the difference between good or bad, it's the difference between something or nothing.
- SiempreViernes 4mo ago
  > Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem? Contrary to what you seem to believe, cars and bicycles are different kinds of things, not two versions of the same fundamental type, so this rhetorical question doesn't make much sense (consider that also your legs provide the function of transportation but are nevertheless not a kind of car).
  - handelaar 4mo ago
    > Contrary to what you seem to believe Please stop doing this. That is not even close to what he said. "Some people" do that? Not a controversial statement, and pretending otherwise is to argue in bad faith.
- m132 4mo ago
  I'm afraid that there's never been a shortage of poor quality software
harshitaneja 4mo ago
I don't have the same rosy memory of the history as you do. I remember very regularly having to wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling and doing all kinds of voodoo I could to get sites to run, sites I used fine the day prior. Figuring it all out on my oh so slow connection and hoping no one calls the landline lest it stops all the progress. Not saying it wasn't a fun period of chaos and I everyday wish for internet to become the wild west it once was. It was acceptable in the sense that I didn't know it could be better, I was used to OS hanging and crashing regularly on my oh-so-fancy dual core system as well regularly so it was all acceptable. Today I find myself having less patience for it all, because things just tend to work a lot more often than they don't. With AI, I find so many small businesses and others I deal with which have their own websites have started to have better design, better performance and while I don't know if they are really accessible but they tend to have more prevalence of aria labels. Not to take away from your experiences, just sharing my anecdotes.
torginus 4mo ago
Personally the biggest conceptual problem with HTML/CSS is that it's incredibly unintuitive with mapping to real-world concepts, and not low-level (or straightforward) enough so that the low-level primitives are easy to manipulate. For example, WPF programs can have great accessibility - this comes from the fact that programmers can manipulate primitives which are semantically meaningful (buttons, lists etc). In HTML its just a sea of divs which lately have become an implementation detail to hang classes on to, and sometimes not even exposed directly to the developer, if you use a SPA framework. There's not a snowballs chance in hell you can build a quality accesibility solution on top of that. HTML's main idea was that HTML was a document model, that described the content in a semantically meaningful way, and CSS was the 'rest' which kind of allowed to make the whole thing pretty - the idea going as far as separating content from looks should allow people to 'theme' their websites and completely redefine layout. That idea has been completely abadoned. I'm not a frontend dev - although I can make a competent webpage by myself, I don't have deep insights into what's going on in the field - maybe Web Components will allow people to create semantically meaningful pages in a standard way? Maybe there should be another layer of abstraction on top of what we have - which is truly semantic, this time for real?
- MDCore 4mo ago
  The sea of divs and the abandonment of HTMLs is a result of the poorly built frameworks. Actual HTML and CSS has not abandoned those core ideas, and the frameworks often reimplement native features badly (e.g. the shadcdn radio button example). HTML crafted with care is not a sea of divs, it is markup one can read that logically and cleanly describes what you see.
onebluecloud 4mo ago
[flagged]
vitally3643 4mo ago
You're describing the state that software was already in prior to AI. Usability, accessibility, intuitiveness have all gone down the toilet in the blind drive to make everything "sleek" and "modern" by removing all text, reducing programs to hieroglyphs floating in a sea of padding. Removing features so somebody can say they changed something. We've refused the notion that software can ever be finished and now have to find some way to justify endlessly updating software forever. AI might make the problem worse, it might not. But the problems you outline and the sharply declining computer literacy they bring are already here, driven 100% by human developers.

by m132 4mo ago

hnthrow0287345 4mo ago

This is why the 'craft' should be left to open source for most commercial software. The business reality just doesn't care for it. Only when you have a PR problem does the business switch back to signalling quality, like Microsoft, although it remains to be seen if they still have the quality part. Most of the craftspeople get to say 'told you so' but also it looks like a sinking ship to them. Once the PR problem is gone, it's back to shipping at the expense of quality. This cycle conflicts with the idea of a craft, which is that you should do it that way all/most of the time. The business will stop caring about quality long enough that your skills will erode, making it a bad mix. Trying to practice a craft where you aren't in control of this cycle is corrosive to the spirit.

hombre_fatal 4mo ago

> LLMs have, on the other hand, made it even easier to botch all of these and quickly roll out a half-baked MVP Compared to the status quo where people pretty much never consider these things, like accessibility, especially not for an MVP? How many people have never added written aria attribute? I would suspect 90%+ of people touching the frontend. The difference with LLMs is that (1) they have a latent rigor for things that you weren't going to spend time caring about anyways and, more importantly, (2) you can encode these things into prompts (AGENTS.md) and processes so that they happen even when you weren't going to invest the time with or without AI. For a lot of people this only means collecting some generic "skills" they found online yet it's still much better than what they were going to do pre-AI. That's why I think AI is saving software in some ways, not leading to worse software. Or, asserting that AI will botch software might hold more weight with people who have already forgotten how dogshit software was pre-AI.

m132 4mo ago
I can somewhat see your point, but it is generally accepted that a wrong ARIA is worse than none, and LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing, the more decent ones heavily emphasize in-depth human code reviews. If our hypothetical developer hasn't used any accessibility-related tags before, what chance is there that those parts of the website will receive adequate testing?
- PaulHoule 4mo ago
  0% if by testing you mean "somebody who uses a screen reader regularly was able to use the product successfully" because nobody seems to do that.
- hombre_fatal 4mo ago
  Testing is an even more powerful subject here since we barely do it. Testing is so hard that we'll agree that, e.g., TDD is great (e.g. ensure your tests actually test something, ensure your code is testable from the start) yet we never do it. And when we do write tests, we are on the hook to be eternally vigilant that they are not stale, that they test something real, that they are not redundant. And they often turn into an append-only file that you resent. Meanwhile, AI is happy to write tests, do red-green TDD cycles, refactor them, prune them, update them, justify and defend them. It will even incidentally write tests for the most aloof vibe-coder by accident because they didn't specify otherwise. Overnight, I went from never testing most of my side projects (except for, say, maybe unit tests in more straightforward things like a parser) to now everything is tested end-to-end. Every time I make a new directional / architectural decision, the tests the AI writes also encode it at the test level to reenforce the decision. It's strictly a better world for software because AI can write and maintain tests. > LLM-assisted codebases, at least these days, only stick together thanks to testing But tests also help humans and ensure human-written software is robust. We only don't test because they are so costly to write and maintain, and our software has always suffered for it. Or the tests become such an unmaintainable mess that our software is now worse because of it!

carlosjobim 4mo ago

> As a protagonist of "decent", you have it increasingly harder competing against those pushing for "acceptable". Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem? > The end result is more crunch and a sharp decline in software quality If you have 10 people eating steak and 10 people starving, then giving rice to the starving people would also sharply decrease dinner quality. AI software is not the difference between good or bad, it's the difference between something or nothing.

SiempreViernes 4mo ago
> Some people go on a bicycle because they can't afford a car. Should car makers see those people as a problem? Contrary to what you seem to believe, cars and bicycles are different kinds of things, not two versions of the same fundamental type, so this rhetorical question doesn't make much sense (consider that also your legs provide the function of transportation but are nevertheless not a kind of car).
- handelaar 4mo ago
  > Contrary to what you seem to believe Please stop doing this. That is not even close to what he said. "Some people" do that? Not a controversial statement, and pretending otherwise is to argue in bad faith.
m132 4mo ago
I'm afraid that there's never been a shortage of poor quality software

harshitaneja 4mo ago

I don't have the same rosy memory of the history as you do. I remember very regularly having to wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling and doing all kinds of voodoo I could to get sites to run, sites I used fine the day prior. Figuring it all out on my oh so slow connection and hoping no one calls the landline lest it stops all the progress. Not saying it wasn't a fun period of chaos and I everyday wish for internet to become the wild west it once was. It was acceptable in the sense that I didn't know it could be better, I was used to OS hanging and crashing regularly on my oh-so-fancy dual core system as well regularly so it was all acceptable. Today I find myself having less patience for it all, because things just tend to work a lot more often than they don't. With AI, I find so many small businesses and others I deal with which have their own websites have started to have better design, better performance and while I don't know if they are really accessible but they tend to have more prevalence of aria labels. Not to take away from your experiences, just sharing my anecdotes.

torginus 4mo ago

Personally the biggest conceptual problem with HTML/CSS is that it's incredibly unintuitive with mapping to real-world concepts, and not low-level (or straightforward) enough so that the low-level primitives are easy to manipulate. For example, WPF programs can have great accessibility - this comes from the fact that programmers can manipulate primitives which are semantically meaningful (buttons, lists etc). In HTML its just a sea of divs which lately have become an implementation detail to hang classes on to, and sometimes not even exposed directly to the developer, if you use a SPA framework. There's not a snowballs chance in hell you can build a quality accesibility solution on top of that. HTML's main idea was that HTML was a document model, that described the content in a semantically meaningful way, and CSS was the 'rest' which kind of allowed to make the whole thing pretty - the idea going as far as separating content from looks should allow people to 'theme' their websites and completely redefine layout. That idea has been completely abadoned. I'm not a frontend dev - although I can make a competent webpage by myself, I don't have deep insights into what's going on in the field - maybe Web Components will allow people to create semantically meaningful pages in a standard way? Maybe there should be another layer of abstraction on top of what we have - which is truly semantic, this time for real?

MDCore 4mo ago
The sea of divs and the abandonment of HTMLs is a result of the poorly built frameworks. Actual HTML and CSS has not abandoned those core ideas, and the frameworks often reimplement native features badly (e.g. the shadcdn radio button example). HTML crafted with care is not a sea of divs, it is markup one can read that logically and cleanly describes what you see.

onebluecloud 4mo ago

[flagged]

vitally3643 4mo ago

You're describing the state that software was already in prior to AI. Usability, accessibility, intuitiveness have all gone down the toilet in the blind drive to make everything "sleek" and "modern" by removing all text, reducing programs to hieroglyphs floating in a sea of padding. Removing features so somebody can say they changed something. We've refused the notion that software can ever be finished and now have to find some way to justify endlessly updating software forever. AI might make the problem worse, it might not. But the problems you outline and the sharply declining computer literacy they bring are already here, driven 100% by human developers.