#web-development5 entries

I found this article interesting. It's about how AI-generated web UIs might help add more value to the work data scientists do. It was also a little depressing to read as a software engineer, but a good reminder of what our role is morphing into within organizations.

The main takeaway for me was that most code is so shoddy these days that we may as well just get LLMs to spit out UIs that are good enough to serve our immediate needs and then move on. She argues that between the break-neck hype cycle JS frameworks go through, high industry turnover, piles of existing tech debt, and constantly changing requirements, code written by LLMs isn't really that much worse than code written by developers anyway and given the astronomical cost savings, maybe we shouldn't be so skeptical about using generated, disposable UIs.

Of course my first reaction is cringe and outrage, but then I have to immediately admit that she's has a point. I've seen a lot of codebases, and I'm ashamed to say that as far I can tell the average quality of software in the wild is poor to terrible. The sad state of web development these days combined with the increasingly impressive quality of code that LLMs (especially Claude) can write, means I have to agree that it actually makes a lot of sense to use them to write software. They're at least very useful for prototyping and getting started, as she points out.

Ultimately this is just another reminder that software engineering is table stakes now. Anybody doing anything tech-adjacent in many organizations is more or less expected to know how to turn their output into a functioning web app a normal person can see, and despite our best efforts this is still an exceedingly complicated task. Nobody can be an expert in so many things at once, and as long as that remains the industry expectation, I predict that we'll continue to see more and more of the gaps filled by LLMs.

One of my favourite blogs on the internet is Simon Willison's Weblog. I recently read this post of his about link blogging and love the idea. I occasionally post longer-form articles or essays on my blog, but usually only one or two per month, and I have a totally chaotic and unorganized web of ways to keep track of other interesting things I'm learning about or doing, but a lot of them are things I would love to share or connect with other people about.

I think his style of blogging is a great fit for the ways I use the internet and keep track of notes. I'm already working on refreshing my website (again), and I think this way of thinking about what to publish and how will really work for me. I'm still enjoying the experience of writing in Obsidian, and I find the built-in daily notes functionality makes it really easy to keep things organized. Now I just have to turn all the content into a website :) I'd like to also eventually migrate all of my various prior attempts at blogging, at least on technical topics, to this system so it's all in one place.