undefined

points

[-]

IMO maintainability is the next frontier. If we just allow coding agents to accrete 1k-LOC solutions to problems, the codebases run quick away from our ability to maintain _some_ level of understanding.

So I'll take a 1-line CSS solution over 60 lines of ResizeObserver/setTimeout business. But.. best practices for frontend isn't just the code.. it's ensuring quality UX, that keyboard navigability works, that layout doesn't shift on users.

by noosphr31 minutes ago|

parent|

[-]

You just regenerate the code base, like how you do a recompile in C. Writing code is 2026 is worth as much as writing machine code was in 1996.

by aidos1 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

Once again, thank you for all the work you and the team have done to improve the web and the experience for developers working with it.

by natorion3 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

Best practices are not dead if they result in better user experience. The focus is less on developer ergonomics though - true that.

by sublinear2 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

The "modern web primitives" are also not even necessarily the "best practice".

Browser-specific implementation gotchas tend to take about a decade to iron out for reasons that never have anything to do with code quality. Users are fickle and so are browser vendors, but that's a different topic.

At the end of the day, there's just no escaping lots of manual testing across device and browser combinations if your goal is a polished result and not just something that "works".

AI has done nothing to make this problem go away. If anything, it's made it worse because people don't even want to look at the code now!

by zeroq1 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Exactly.

I've recently finished a browser game specifically targeting an old iPad Air 1 we had lying around the house.

I had a working version after a weekend, but it took me a month to make it run smoothly on an over 10 years old mobile device. And the most recent browser available is almost 10 years old.

Surprisingly I didn't missed too many "modern" JS features, as these were mostly functional programming oriented which doesn't play well with optimization anyways, and the ES6 was more than enough as a programming platform.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that "the best practice" should be making your apps fast and accessible - as much as you can without having to sacrifice something you value - instead of chasing the latest and shiniest.

Don't be a fashion driven developer. :)

by brlewis3 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

>Pretty soon no one is going to read any of the code AI produces and that's a scary thought.

This is a misconception. Have your favorite agent summarize this video for you: https://www.youtube.com/live/zcLPGC-tvgk?si=YR68aHlFESD053bh

by ozim2 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Ugh it is Uncle Bob, not going to torture AI with this guy.

But the fun part is that all of the proper software engineering practices are aimed at lowering amount of context a developer has to keep in his mind. So it directly applies to agent context. Less verbose code, less tokens to burn, separation of concerns, lower chance agent breaks something unrelated etc.

by vik02 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

>>Pretty soon no one is going to read any of the code AI produces and that's a scary thought.

>This is a misconception. Have your favorite agent *summarize this video for you*: https://www.youtube.com/live/zcLPGC-tvgk?si=YR68aHlFESD053bh

I can't tell if you're joking here

by brlewis2 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

I am not generally against using AI to reduce the amount of information you need to pay attention to, and I was not joking. There are multiple places in that interview with good articulation of the reasons why software fundamentals still matter, and what happens when you don't look at at least some of the AI-generated code.

by drawfloat1 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Why don't you just quote them then? Or quote whatever the LLM you used gave.