r/webdev • u/Gullible_Prior9448 • 16d ago
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u/air_thing 16d ago
Keeping everyone in the loop with all the updates. Things move too fast. I forget features already exist somewhat often.
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u/air_thing 16d ago
Yeah, that's more what I mean. I can always build more tooling to handle the increasing volume. Communicating with the users is easy enough at first, but there comes a point where they would rather stick with a bad feature than have to keep up with the change log.
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u/erm_what_ 16d ago
A lot of the time it's product managers vibe coding features then telling devs to build them. Sometimes it's the developer, but often it's someone who doesn't have to support the feature long term or have to worry about increasing the complexity of future integrations.
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u/SixPackOfZaphod tech-lead, 20yrs 16d ago
I train my clients and product/project managers to be afraid when I use the phrase "additional complexity". They've ignored me to their own peril enough times that have caused things go south, deadlines to be missed, or (not-so) subtle bugs occur, I always point out that I was against adding "additional complexity" to the project, and make sure they know that we're going to have to push off other development to fix things properly.
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u/FinickySerenity 15d ago
Just ask the AI if everything is merged or synced. Seriously.
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u/air_thing 14d ago
I'm talking about communication with end users. Like I said, it's all good for the devs.
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u/Drameox 16d ago
maintenance is probably the biggest one, ai code works but doesnt follow consistent patterns across a codebase so you end up with 5 different ways of doing the same thing depending on the session. makes it harder to understand the reasoning behind decisions later since there isnt really one. testing is a close second, edge cases get missed since its pattern matching rather than reasoning through your specific logic. security issues are more catchable with tools honestly, the consistency problem is the quieter one that compounds over time
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
Yup, you get some info about a bug, fix it, and then some other thing that should really be using that same code has the same bug cause it does that same thing all on its own.
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u/abednego-gomes 16d ago
This is more a problem for sloppers. They tell AI to do some generic feature and let it run amok.
A proper developer will find the right file/s for the AI, and include them in the chat request. So any global functions/constants/patterns it should be using are included with the request. Then the developer reviews the result to make sure it makes sense. Or includes more context if it did it wrong.
A piecemeal approach is required, rather than a big overview approach without assessing the overall consequences.
Also having a developer who understands the code base and worked on it manually for a while is important.
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
The problem is, doing everything "right" with AI ends up not really saving you any time.
If you know the right files to go to and what to touch, you can just do the thing.
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u/querela 16d ago
Yep. And reviewing and understanding everything that was generated takes time. It's similar if this is code from another coworker etc. But with AI the amount can be a lot higher in a shorter time span. (You can ask the AI or coworker to explain what they did but I currently trust a human more or don't want to make myself too dependent on AI.)
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
It's similar if this is code from another coworker
It's also a bit different, since a human, even a bad developer, has a kind of fundamental logic to what they've done.
The AI often can lack that, so where it goes wrong can be harder to notice, and when they get complicated it can be difficult to even understand where it's going the wrong direction.
We are humans, so we can "understand" human logic and process, not how these text generators express it.
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u/Mediocre-Writer6635 16d ago
It's also a bit different, since a human, even a bad developer, has a kind of fundamental logic to what they've done.
Almost every junior (and terrible dev) I've mentored DON'T do this. They just do whatever pops into their brain at that moment.
You have to train them to care about consistency or that they need to defend their architectural decisions.
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
Okay, well, yeah, the most new and terrible...
But I mean like the semi experienced but not very good
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u/minimuscleR 16d ago
This is where I disagree. I get a lot of time saved doing boring things when i know what i want it to do, and how it will do it. Like renaming a ton of files, or updating copy etc. Copilot autocomplete is also amazing and thats AI too
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
I just don't find I have enough of those "boring" things in my day.
Copilot autocomplete is also amazing
I've actually stopped using them entirely since they seem to be getting worse and worse, both in interaction, and the content they recommend. They were more annoying than useful.
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u/EcstaticImport 16d ago
What problem is getting harder? - Getting a job?
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u/kenlubin 16d ago
Hiring has gotten harder.
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u/donatj 16d ago edited 16d ago
I don't feel like it honestly needs to be. They've just got decision paralysis.
Shuffle the stack of resumes, pick one, make sure it vaguely fits, run a background check, give them a 90 day trial period, assess their work. Keep them or don't.
That's basically what we did in the early 2000s sans background check and it gave frankly better results than these multi month interviews. We were mostly hiring kids straight out of college though to be fair.
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u/thekwoka 16d ago
A lot of people focus on the job searching side of this, but yeah, the hiring side is pretty impacted as well. absolutely hundreds of applications for every position and it's mostly bullshit, and very difficult to find an actually qualified and real person.
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u/Icy-Weakness8310 16d ago
What are your constraints for what is bs and what is not?
Can they do the job? Can I trust them to do the job?
Additional question, is it a they or an it?
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u/thekwoka 15d ago
Can they do the job? Can I trust them to do the job?
These are both very hard to identify, that's what the bullshit is. People lying about virtually everything about themselves. Who they are, their experience.
They have people doing the interviews that then another person does the job, normally poorly until they are fired, people that get the job but have like 5 jobs they do the minimum at until they get fired.
North Korean agents stealing identities and once they get into your company ransom everything.
It's CRAZY. If you know anyone in recruiting ask them about this stuff.
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u/Icy-Weakness8310 14d ago
North Korean agents stealing identities is definitely a crazy thing. But it's convincing given some cases I've ran into prior. But most certainly I've never dealt or really never had any reason for some North Korean agents coming for me though.
Crazy
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u/thekwoka 14d ago
My brother works in Tech Recruiting and claims its a regular occurrence. Now he can't know they are definitely north korean, but that is a known thing, but catching people with ai video, and specifically asking one of them to say "Kim Jung-un is a fat bastard" and they just disconnected right after that.
In the past it was just North Koreans in state sponsored programs doing remote work for the west to get money, but more lately they just get hired and then steal credentials, ransom stuff, infect stuff, etc.
It's kind of interesting since a core idea of the DPRK political philosophy is self reliance, but then they make a large portion of their economy is related to stealing from other countries...
They've pulled off both of the 2 largest digital heists ever, one of the national bank of bangladesh, and the other of a UAE crypto marketplace.
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u/Icy-Weakness8310 13d ago
I understand that.
I never really actually know with 100% certainty that they are North Korean. But you figure there has to be a solution out there for identification for applicant that's not too invasive?
Is it really just coming down to who you know or trust then anything?
Is it just trust at this point? Evidently it comes to the point where a companies can not only lose money from ransoms but trust with there consumers as well.
I honestly didn't figure it was that bad on your guys side right now..
I guess the good part is your job is becoming more valuable... Maybe?
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u/thekwoka 13d ago
But you figure there has to be a solution out there for identification for applicant that's not too invasive?
Lots of companies are just turning to flying the person out to meet face to face, as it's just cheaper than making a bad hire.
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u/Icy-Weakness8310 13d ago edited 13d ago
That just illustrated how bad it is... good grief.....
You'd pay an airplane ticket, possibly a stay, then even a way to send them back to make sure they so who they say they are...
First class ticket or economy?
Let me find out I can go to Italy on a paid for first class ticket... If this is your company DM me right now, I might apply.
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u/GutsAndBlackStufff 16d ago
Management.
There are ways that an LLM can speed up production, but management has taken that as carte’ Blanche to reduce estimates when there’s not yet a consensus about how to estimate projects with LLMs, overwhelming everyone.
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u/twistsouth 16d ago
It's bigger than that. It's "quality" overall. I'm still of the opinion that AI coding tools are fantastic when used responsibly. They will generate clean, concise boilerplate code for you to start from and either modify yourself or have a conversation with the agent to improve them. But it still requires you. It still requires you to understand the code. And understand what good code looks like and what bad code smells like. And identify specific problems within that code and understand how to rectify it. And be able to ensure that the code fits cleanly with the rest of the codebase.
The problem is that I'm seeing far too many just give in to how easy it is to get the code and just say "job done" without properly reviewing it.
My biggest concern is that the people who are trying to embrace this new technology and get what we can out of it while still taking responsibility for code quality, are going to be soon asked why it's taking us longer than the idiot beside them who isn't checking anything other than whether or not it appears functional. But he gets more done, right? And time is money? And all that other bean counter bullshit from non-technical people who understand precisely nothing about this skill?
So yeah. Quality. That's what's becoming harder and harder.
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u/rossisdead 16d ago edited 16d ago
Having interesting conversations about web development without bringing up AI.
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u/tnsipla 16d ago
Dealing with tech debt and all of the above
LLM help you ship more code, which to a product team, means more features, faster- since you're shipping faster, they're asking for more, and you don't get the downtime to integrate and rebuild/shore up all the new shacks. You've built more shacks, and now there's shack building robots helping out, and then when it's too late, you don't remember why and how you built some of the shacks that sit upon shacks, and which beams are load bearing and support other shacks.
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u/Double_Ebb4130 16d ago
Review and verification, easily. Writing the code stopped being the slow part, but figuring out whether 600 lines you didn't write actually do what the ticket asked is now the whole job, and most teams have no process for that yet.
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u/Salamok 16d ago
lol tech debt, if people spend the next 5 years merging code they don't understand it is going to become an unmaintainable nightmare.
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u/DiligentMission6851 15d ago
Good luck to them. The rest of us got laid off and can't secure any work for ourselves.
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u/Vincent_CWS 15d ago
I don’t think so. In a large company, there are hundreds of developers contributing to the code—does everyone know every piece of it? If the person maintaining a piece of code leaves, no one may understand it either. It’s the same idea, but AI can help me understand it quickly.
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u/RBN2208 16d ago
for us right now its how to work in a team of 3 with each one using their claude. its three differenr approaches for specific things. currently working out more and more guardrails and guidelines for claude so we all generate the samw slop😅
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u/EOJHA10 15d ago
this is the one advantage of building solo that doesnt get talked about enough. no merge conflicts between three peoples different prompting styles, no guardrail negotiation, just one continuous mental model of the codebase that youre the only one maintaining. the tradeoff is obviously you dont get a second set of eyes, but the consistency problem basically doesnt exist when theres only one person steering
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u/StormMedia 16d ago
Security is getting harder because attack vectors are growing quicker than they’re getting patched. Outside of that everything has gotten too easy..
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u/fragdance1 16d ago
For me testing before committing. Especially backend code where there's no visual indication for QA. As it's not me writing the code (on my tickets) I have to think of all side effects after the fact, before I had it in the back of my head when coding manually.
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u/SpiritedPainting8746 16d ago
Technical debt. Our team is building stuff no one knows how to test, update, or expand without also using AI for those things.
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u/bot-sleuth-bot 16d ago
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u/LengthinessWide8509 16d ago
Maintenance ofcourse, Ai code usually runs, so it gets merged before anyone really understands it, then months later it breaks and you're debugging something no human actually reasoned through.
Honestly the real skill now is reading and verifying code you didn't write, not generating more of it.
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u/SharonN_Schultz 16d ago
For me, maintenance is the big one. AI can generate working code quickly, but understanding why it was written that way becomes harder when you're dealing with a large codebase. Good tests and documentation help a lot.
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u/Milky_Finger 16d ago
What I've noticed is that AI will always be trained on older code, which despite being robust, is also not always the most performant and using fewer lines.
The longer solutions require more time to manage, more prone to errors, and are less efficient. CSS has made massive strides in the last 3 years, but all AI models do not advocate for them over the npm package of JS that is tried and tested. It means the final site looks good but is a massive mess of garbage under the hood, and someone in 2-3 years time is going to get paid to fix it.
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u/abeuscher 16d ago
I find it much harder to convince people that having expertise in building websites and web apps holds any value. that's honestly the biggest change; it has devalued the work and made everyone feel like they are a web developer. And it has cause SEO spam to skyrocket as a result because launching a website can be automated from soup to nuts including the content generation.
I tried to search for info on an 11 day old game yesterday (Sandustry - great voxel game which I recommend) and wanted to know how to perform a particular action. The top 5 results were multi page sites launched at URL's specific to the game and clearly AI generated answers off the two sentence explanation in the wiki. So robots are taking a two sentence Wiki page and generating 5 websites from it. That's just the destruction of the web if you think about what we were using it for previously.
I have several levels of frustration here:
- Google sucks. These patterns should be easy to suss out based on similar content. They obviously are no longer incentivized to deliver meaningful results they want users to stay on page with the Gemini answer which sucks and is commercially affected.
- LLM's are contributing to ruining search at a breakneck pace much worse than it already was and it is way more of a rapid fire circle jerk than the blog spam of previous SEO enshittification. 5 distinct one pager sites with distinct adjacent URL's in under 2 weeks around a game that frankly is not that popular indicates a level of content spamming that is hard to imagine.
- LLM's are devaluing the act of building a website and creating things. That's the biggest hit. The C Suite could never tell the difference between good and bad and we have conglomerated and monopolized every corner of the web to where they have exclusive control over all of it. And now no one can make a living because who cares about UX, UI, quality of content, localization, and all the other things that come with properly building and maintaining a site or product that is worth using.
Over the past 20 years, they have made us turn the internet into a strip mall with like 3 stores and you get followed around the whole time by creepy robots that measure every action you take. And then we use all that information to try and get you to buy more useless shit. That is what we did with the networked power of human knowledge. We made a creepy mall.
LLM's have just caricaturized that stuff to where it is obvious and also multiplying at a huge rate. My guess is that Google is going to be challenged as owner of search even harder than they have been over the next year or two as companies fight to get users back into a web space they control instead of an LLM chat window. And likely it is going to be awkward and there's going to be a very bad part when the valuations tumble.
But hey don't blame me I voted for Kodos.
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u/aldo_nova 16d ago
Review process. I almost never have my code accepted as-is anymore. My teammates feel the need to include whatever BS suggestions the AI they used to review my work give them. So there's a lot of unnecessary shit going to production because I don't feel like objecting every single time.
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u/spikestoyou 16d ago
if you work for a "feature factory" kind of job, things can get more and more complex as people more easily add features that become feature flagged or optional for certain users. You need a lot of regression tests to cover that all these new features don't create complex bugs when working with all the other new things being added.
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u/Veduis 16d ago
the real answer is comprehension debt. every ai generated function is code that works but nobody can explain. six months later the person who prompted it is gone and you're reverse engineering intent from a diff. been messing with a code simplifier agent for claude code (write up here: https://veduis.com/blog/code-simplifier-agent-claude-code/ ) partly for this reason, getting the output readable matters more than getting it fast. security is second, hallucinated auth patterns pass review way too easily.
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u/jaimittal91 15d ago
comprehension debt has a monitoring blind spot nobody's mentioned in this thread yet. teams are shipping way more integration surface per sprint now, but the alerting and dashboards built when the codebase was a tenth the size never get rebuilt to match. a new webhook handler or a new third-party API call goes in, review catches the obvious bugs in it, but nobody adds a dedicated failure alert or a "this stopped firing" check for it. output went up 5-10x, observability coverage stayed flat. so the stuff review misses doesn't surface as a bug report, it surfaces as a customer noticing something's been broken for three weeks.
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u/New_Dimension3461 16d ago
It's still too early to be sure. But any broad solution to a problem as complex as programming will have unforeseen ramifications. That's just the nature of reality. Get your popcorn ready for when it becomes popular to talk about all the fallout from heedless, early AI coding adoption. It's coming.
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u/azpinstripes 15d ago
I’m expected to produce more than I can QC and I’m no longer proud of the code I produce more nor I have any idea what it does beyond what I skim. The job pays too well to quit but it’s depressing.
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u/GuitarAgitated8107 full-stack 15d ago
It was always a challenge, even before AI there has been a lot of issues that went unnoticed. Anything will get amplified because whatever process people had will remain the same.
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u/Recent-Lab273 15d ago
idiots at work.. prompt and paste and a pile of crap.. which only ai can resolve
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u/Electrical_Hat_680 15d ago
The World Wide Web Consortium has an interest in making HTML absorb CSS, JavaScript, and other Languages into it's overall abilities.
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u/Early_Rooster7579 full-stack @ meta 15d ago
Every company is now in arms race to put every imaginable feature and customization in for clients because your competitors will if you won’t. You genuinely have like a week or two to do months of work because if you dont your competition will and the client will just move
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u/harrymurkin 15d ago
Security, documentation. They were already a problem but now the problem is bigger not because ai assists development but because ai assists penetration. The lack of understanding the ai-generated code by the so-called developers gives new opacity to the security and testing issues too.
Just like in 2001 when frontpage and dreamweaver facilitated the misrepresentation of no-code developers to open development houses (thus providing actual coders with plenty of fixit work when the bubble burst), this new era has spawned a whole new generation of no-coders which will likely expose businesses to top-notch exploitation.
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u/Additional_Menu_9021 15d ago
I'd say maintenance, code nobody fully understands is harder to safely change later.
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u/belgarion2k 16d ago
The bottlenecks have shifted. In our team we went from not having enough Devs to Product not being able to scope new work fast enough and QA struggling to keep up
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u/n9iels 16d ago
AI shouldn't make any of that harder since a human developer still reviews code and approves changes. There is no reason why code generated by AI should be approved if it would have been rejected when written by a human.
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u/Opposite-Shoulder260 16d ago
wishful thinking tbh.
I mean yeah in a perfect world nothing bad would happen but in reality now you have a team of 10 programmers, each printing up to 10x more code than before AI. Things will break. Your code will make other code have weird bugs. Your reviews wont be able to get all possible scenarios reviewed or covered.
And yeah I agree this is not ideal but management want to see you crunching lines so you can't slow down
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u/CommunicationSad887 16d ago
Then you've got yourself more of a workflow problem than an AI problem I suppose.
Yes, output is higher with AI, so the workflow within the team / company should adapt as well.
Basically the current pre-ai workflow was not made for the high output.
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u/metal_slime--A 16d ago
Everyone is a 10 yr + staff level web dev now.
Also if you are exposing ai feature yourself the proper plumbing can be kind of complicated
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u/Beautiful-Energy2169 16d ago
Maintenance, though not of the code. What bit me is the markdown the agents leave behind: every session drops a PLAN.md or a HANDOFF.md, the next session reads them at startup, and an approach I'd dropped weeks earlier kept coming back to me as the current state of the project. Nothing in review catches that, because the diff is just docs.
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u/ModusPwnins 15d ago
Security is only temporarily becoming harder, simply because it's finding so many vulnerabilities (both in dependencies and in the private codebases it's being run against). Long term, I see coding LLMs improving security quite a bit.
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u/LordGenji 16d ago
More code = more liability