Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how web dev is decidedly un-fun now. Sure I can produce things a hundred (probably a thousand) times faster than when I started as an engineer and the benefit of that is that my output higher and to a much higher quality level.
But as we’ve made web dev (and really all software engineering) codified, industrialised and KPI driven we’ve beaten all risk and interest out of it into some kind of greige experience.
React is just COBOL with JSX…
People complain about the AI slop. AI isn’t the cause of the slop, it’s the methods we use to incentivise what is produced, and those methods were already creating “human slop” long before ChatGPT. Heaven help me to look at another website made with tailwind (or Bootstrap before that) or using the material design system.
That process just got supercharged by AI coding tools.
I have a whole perspective on why I think this has occurred due to the corporatisation of the web but I’ll leave that for another day.
In the mean time, do me a favour. Use your AI assistant and go make the most stupid, wacky, off the wall thing you can imagine, then ping me about what you did with it - publicly or privately either way. It doesn’t have to be good or generate a million likes or be monetisable.
Just go and make something because you find it fun.