> you need fancy tooling to ensure everyone can work at a reasonable level of productivity. If you have a thousand people working on a single product, yes, but you also have the resources to have dedicated tool support teams at that level. In my experience, if you’re under multiple dozens of developers or not everyone works on all of your projects, the tools fragment because people aren’t combining or configuring them the same way and there’s enough churn in the front-end tool space that you’ll hit various compatibility issues which lower the effectiveness of sharing across projects. This is especially true if you’ve hired people who self-identify as, say, Next or Tailwind developers rather than web developers and lack the understanding of the underlying technology to fix complex problems.
I’m better at it in the spaces where I deliver value. For me that’s the backend, and I’m building complex backends with simple frontends. Sounds like your expertise is the front end, so you’re gonna be doing stuff that’s beyond me, and beyond what the AI was trained on. I found ways to make the AI solve backend pain points (documentation, tests, boiler plate like integrations). There’s probably spaces where the AI can make your work more productive, or, like my move into the front end, do work that you didn’t do before.
Can we post a single phrase as a HN article? This is one of the main problems with web development nowadays, nobody gets this right... to the point that it's popular to criticize a company trying to hire a single person for both holes as "cheapening out". Also, this is a really obvious thing. It's unbelievable how the main way people organize is the other way around.
honestly, with LLMs, everything is fun again. embedded dev with a billion toolchains, GPU development with each vendors bespoke API, ffmpeg with its billion parameters - if anything, you could say LLMs bailed us out of the impending ultra-specialization. without LLMs, we might be facing a world where 30% of the workforce is in software dev. i am keeping my eyes peeled on vibe-coding PCB layouts and schematics. a lot of eyes in that direction already but its still early.
> LLMs bailed us out of the impending ultra-specialization. This is fundamentally what makes them so DAMAGING to humanity. They didn't bail us out, they robbed us of it.
100% the opposite. LLMs lack high level creativity, wisdom and taste. Being a generalist is how you build these. For example, there's a common core to music, art, food, writing, etc that you don't see until you've gotten good at 3+ aesthetic fields. There are common patterns in different academic disciplines and activities that can supercharge your priors and help you make better decisions. LLMs can "see" these these connections if explicitly prompted with domains and details, but they don't seem to reason with them in mind or lean on them by default. On the other hand, LLMs are being aggressively RL'd by the top 10% of various fields, so single field expertise by some of the best in the world is 100% baked in and the default.