LLMs, including open ones, are really good at this it turns out. It stands to reason, there is tons of training material out there no doubt they have consumed and are ready to regurgitate.

Yesterday I one-shotted several interactive pages, that Qwen built out of straight HTML and Javascript. I handed it my API (source code, not even a swagger, via an MCP that Qwen wrote for me), asked for a frontend, and it delivered. One page at a time to keep context down, and mightve gotten lucky on the first draw but after the first one I told it to make the next ones like the first.

Can't say I've had that experience with backend languages & frameworks, incl writing that same API, but perhaps I'm off the beaten path with those, or perhaps there's greater breadth of things to do vs a narrower set of acceptance criteria? IDK.

Here I was sweating that I'd have to research and learn a current-day frontend framework. It felt like a magic wand using consumer-grade AI. HTML and plain old Javascript was plenty.

Tangent but apropos of other contemporary threads on HN, it puts a spin on supply chain threats. There's no NPM or anything, except perhaps whatever mysteries are baked into the model.