5 ms·

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

68 points by nirvanis 3mo ago

poly2it 3mo ago
For some reason I find Claude's writing often has an oddly condescending tone when it tries to be empathetic.
- dpritchett 3mo ago
  I imagine they're going for avuncular but a lot of us as adult engineers receive it as patronizing.
- nhod 3mo 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.
  - yulker 3mo 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
  - JimDabell 3mo 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.
- Zababa 3mo ago
  Claude in general is condescending and often assumes it knows better than you.
- Tade0 3mo ago
  To me it bears similarities to the writings of Rebecca Hazelton: https://rebeccahazelton.com/ https://rebeccahazelton.com/
memjay 3mo 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.
- mhitza 3mo 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.
  - camillomiller 3mo ago
    Not a suspect, it's a certainty. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-design-aesthetic-thats-taking-over-the-internet https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-des...
- yulker 3mo 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 3mo ago
  Oh. I assumed an article that references hand-writing things would be hand written. Silly me :(
- mbreese 3mo 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 3mo ago
p4bl0 3mo 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 3mo ago
  >This is too oddly written to read in its entirety It's AI slop.
- alwa 3mo ago
  They had me at “scar tissue grown over a real wound.”
stephenlf 3mo ago
I enjoyed the read. Thank you.
adithyassekhar 3mo 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 3mo 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.
Zababa 3mo 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 3mo ago
Server side rendering on a serverless platform is all you need to know about “modern” front ends.
mdrzn 3mo ago
Another AI slop article. "the generated code quietly assumes you know everything in the eight layers above"
smalltorch 3mo ago
[dead]
chr15m 3mo ago
We need the exact opposite of this.
- tantalor 3mo 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
  - chr15m 3mo ago
    I mean we need "a field guide to hand-written HTML for the modern front end developer."
Brendinooo 3mo 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 3mo ago
I was wondering what anybody thought of a library I wrote a few years ago: https://www.combatentropy.com/tools/cobblestone/ 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 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.
JimDabell 3mo 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 3mo 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
tantalor 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    - tantalor 3mo ago
      Same. Bookmarked to come back to later.
  - re 3mo 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.

68 points by nirvanis 3mo ago

poly2it 3mo ago

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

dpritchett 3mo ago
I imagine they're going for avuncular but a lot of us as adult engineers receive it as patronizing.
nhod 3mo 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.
- yulker 3mo 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
- JimDabell 3mo 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.
Zababa 3mo ago
Claude in general is condescending and often assumes it knows better than you.
Tade0 3mo ago
To me it bears similarities to the writings of Rebecca Hazelton: https://rebeccahazelton.com/ https://rebeccahazelton.com/

memjay 3mo 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.

mhitza 3mo 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.
- camillomiller 3mo ago
  Not a suspect, it's a certainty. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-design-aesthetic-thats-taking-over-the-internet https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-des...
yulker 3mo 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 3mo ago
Oh. I assumed an article that references hand-writing things would be hand written. Silly me :(
mbreese 3mo 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 3mo ago

p4bl0 3mo 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 3mo ago
>This is too oddly written to read in its entirety It's AI slop.
alwa 3mo ago
They had me at “scar tissue grown over a real wound.”

stephenlf 3mo ago

I enjoyed the read. Thank you.

adithyassekhar 3mo 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 3mo 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.

Zababa 3mo 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 3mo ago

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

mdrzn 3mo ago

Another AI slop article. "the generated code quietly assumes you know everything in the eight layers above"

smalltorch 3mo ago

[dead]

chr15m 3mo ago

We need the exact opposite of this.

tantalor 3mo 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
- chr15m 3mo ago
  I mean we need "a field guide to hand-written HTML for the modern front end developer."

Brendinooo 3mo 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 3mo ago

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

JimDabell 3mo 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 3mo 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

tantalor 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
  - tantalor 3mo ago
    Same. Bookmarked to come back to later.
- re 3mo 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.