DGCA

New York Times best seller, well received by critics, good reviews on Goodreads and Audible, hundreds of thousands of copies sold. Reductionism can often lead to naive presuppositions.

That is the question

Are you implementing designs that were given to you or having AI generate the design as well? I could see it being better at the latter.

Frontend dev for 13+ years here. In my experience it’s pretty bad at anything but basic frontend stuff. I’ve tried all the models, editors, Claude code etc.

It’s constantly wrong about the simplest things. Just now it was hallucinating about CSS grid properties.

I’m convinced that how good AI seems is inversely correlated to someone’s knowledge in that domain, as you also mentioned.

Still super useful in my day to day but I have to hand hold and correct it constantly.

I didn't set up Biome and can't tell you why it wasn't working, but people on the team couldn't get the VSCode extension to show lint errors in their editor (Cursor, primarily). I misspoke about there being a CI issue. It was more like disagreeing with their defaults, e.g. `useHookAtTopLevel` and `noUnusedVars` are off by default.

`useHookAtTopLevel` is especially confusing since other React hook rules are on, and `eslint-plugin-react-hooks` defaults its analogue to "error".

But yeah, no linting in the editor was kinda bonkers.

Joined a team that maintains a pretty popular TS library recently. The repo was using Biome. It was unanimously disliked by the team. Linting was broken for most people and in CI. I replaced it with Prettier + ESLint, everyone was into it, and we realized we had a bunch of issues that weren't getting reported due to it not working in CI.

> To be eligible for membership in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, you must be a citizen of the United States over the age of 21 who believes in God (whatever that means to you).

Bums, I don't meet 2/3 reqs.

IMO, if your star developers aren’t writing readable, maintainable code (at least most of the time, some things are inherently complex), I don’t think it’s right to call them star developers.

FWIW, the problem you’re talking about isn’t one I’ve encountered very often at most of the companies I’ve worked at, and I’ve worked at small startups and large enterprises. I genuinely wonder why that is.

I haven't done anything with Cursor that I wouldn't be able to do without it so far, but for me it's made certain tasks _much_ faster.

Wanting more than the bare minimum, I imagine.

Just curious, what’s the fad you’re referring to. React? Client side rendering? Single page apps?

1. async/await is a thing.

2. The GraphQL spec tells you how errors should be handled.

I still identify with the “frontend developer” title, even though my skill set has grown beyond it. Best practices are framework dependent, the tooling one should choose is dependent on their problem space, and we do appreciate simplicity.

No one is forcing people to use React, Svelte, Vue, etc. The sentiment of wishing for a simpler time has never felt right to me, cause no one is policing what people use. If you feel like people are forcing you into frameworks, I’m sorry, and I feel like I have a piece of advice.

If you truly believe a framework isn’t worth it, tell your team why. You might be right, and you might be wrong.

I’ve worked at large and small companies; discussions about what technologies to use have always been welcome. I’ve advocated for and won when making a case for “simpler solutions,” when it makes sense.

All that said if you think using a framework framework === complexity for the sake of complexity, you’re wrong. OP I’m not saying you think this, but I have to imagine that it’s the sentiment of at least part of the folks who made this the top comment.

Not a single frontend dev I know in real life has had the same negative reaction about hooks that I often see on HN.

I remember some people taking a little longer to adopt them either cause it wasn’t necessary or cause it didn’t click right away, but eventually everyone learned how to use em, and no one complains about them cause they’re just a tool you use if you use React (which is the framework of choice for most companies).

Honestly, the reaction I often see from HN around most frontend topics usually doesn’t match what the frontend and full stack devs I interact with regularly are saying. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we all love React and want to switch state management libraries every week; it’s that React is fine, the ecosystem is fine, and we specifically don’t use every library that comes out week after week.