llm/5888b8dc-b96e-4444-9c3c-465dde409e92/batch-8-30c13d1b-77ee-4ef9-af37-71a6d96cf4b1-input.json
You are a comment classifier. Given a list of topics and a batch of comments, assign each comment to up to 3 of the most relevant topics.
TOPICS (use these 1-based indices):
1. AI productivity claims skepticism
2. Joy of programming vs shipping products
3. Skill atrophy concerns with AI
4. Experienced vs inexperienced developer AI gains
5. Web development complexity is optional
6. Code review burden with AI
7. Vibe coding quality concerns
8. Learning while using LLMs
9. Time-constrained developers benefiting
10. AI for boilerplate and scaffolding
11. Frontend framework fatigue
12. Managing AI like junior developers
13. Return to simpler web stacks
14. AI as autocomplete evolution
15. Side project enablement
16. Technical debt from AI code
17. Cost and pricing of AI tools
18. Pattern recognition and code quality
19. Parenting and hobby coding time
20. AI hallucinations and reliability
COMMENTS TO CLASSIFY:
[
{
"id": "46493862",
"text": "Au contraire. Web development has always been fun, unless you add all the crap mentioned in TFA.\n\nIf you feel you need all that stuff to feel grown up, then I guess LLMs help a lot. But the barometer hasn't changed: make something that people love."
}
,
{
"id": "46493901",
"text": "So you’re skipping any sort of a build pipeline? You’re not going to bundle, so no code minification? You’re going to skip tests ? And everyone who uses these things just does them to “feel grown up” and not for any particular benefit or purpose beyond that?"
}
,
{
"id": "46496779",
"text": "You can use esbuild to build your entire project with a single command. Node has a built in test runner. You only need the complexity because you're convinced you need it."
}
,
{
"id": "46502425",
"text": "You are responding with a point different than the one I was replying to."
}
,
{
"id": "46495267",
"text": "No. My point is more nuanced than that. All of the things in the article have value to someone, but their value to you is defined in terms of how much better they make your product.\n\nIf you spend so much time on the cumulation of product-adjacent activities that you don't make a good product, then their cumulative value to you was negative.\n\nBut I do, personally, love a good build system. The value is extremely high and it only takes 10 minutes to set one up."
}
,
{
"id": "46495928",
"text": "But then you’re just saying “you should spend time on things which are valuable”. Isn’t that obvious?"
}
,
{
"id": "46496317",
"text": "Not so sure these days tbh.\nPeople are trying to shove as much shiny tools as possible instead of sometimes writing 10 vanilla JS lines and proceed to next feature or project.\nMaybe it’s already exhausted, but left-pad, is-odd, is-even are still my examples for people."
}
,
{
"id": "46494109",
"text": "I kinda feel the same way, don't get me wrong, I'm a developer at soul level, I absolutely love programming, but I love more getting shit done, automating things, taking the human out of the equation and putting the computer to do it, AI lets me do that. I work in cybersecurity as a WAF admin, my job is 100% that, but I'm also the only developer so anything that needs to be scripted or developed I get to do it. One week I created 4 different scripts with Gemini Canvas to automate some tedious work, it took my I don't know, 3 hours? Instead of 1 or 2 weeks? Yeah sign me in."
}
,
{
"id": "46492610",
"text": "Related question which might fit here so I'm going to try:\n\nWhat is the absolute cheapest way to get started on AI coding a simple website? I have a couple ideas I want to test out and get out of my head and onto the web but have resisted for years because my webdev knowledge is stuck in 2004 and I've had no desire to change that. These are not complicated things (all static, I think) but... I hate webdev.\n\nI am not really willing to pay to do any initial explorations, but if I like where things are going then, sure, I'll pay up. I have a decently powerful machine that can run things locally, but it is Windows (because I'm an EE, sadly), which does matter."
}
,
{
"id": "46492620",
"text": "Google Gemini has a generous free tier.\n\nYou could start by experimenting in AI Studio - https://aistudio.google.com/ - then have a go at coding agents using their Gemini CLI or Antigravity tools.\n\nFor what you're describing the free tiers of the Claude and ChatGPT web apps would probably work fine too."
}
,
{
"id": "46494871",
"text": "I think Google Antigravity works on a free account too, right?"
}
,
{
"id": "46492639",
"text": "Cloudflare has a ~zero cost hosting service if all you need is static web page."
}
,
{
"id": "46494995",
"text": "Yeah, I had same experience, these days I just vibed some stuff in web, i do think vibe frontend/web is great for backend developer. Checkout the one just finished yesterday. https://slsqp-vis.shuo23333.app/hs_all_cases_viz , a slsqp solver visualization."
}
,
{
"id": "46496076",
"text": "Been using GitHub Copilot to handle the tedious webpack/babel config files and it's a game changer for modern web dev. No more spending hours debugging build pipeline issues - it generates 90% correct configs that just need minor tweaks."
}
,
{
"id": "46493784",
"text": "And even more fun with tools/services like exe.dev!\n\nAlso apparently the combined of Google Antigravity/$20 Google AI plan/Opus 4.5 is blowing up the AI community lately in Reddit. Apparently the limits right now of Opus thru Antigravity are insanely generous/incredible value. Obviously this could change at any time but perhaps Google has the funds/resources to continue to provide value like this in an attempt to capture the dev userbase / win the AI war."
}
,
{
"id": "46491711",
"text": "Before I clicked on this I was optimistic and thought this was going to be about how we've turned a corner and the web stack pendulum is now swinging back to the easier days before frontend frameworks."
}
,
{
"id": "46496030",
"text": "Agree, I developed a 150K line stock analytics Saas that started with the will to provide my son with some tools to analyse stocks.\n\nI enjoyed this experience of CLI coding so much that I developed Market Sentiment parsing 300,000 business articles and news daily, a dividend based strategy with calendar of payouts and AI optimised strategies to extract every drop of interest, an alert system for a strategy you backtested in the playground and its key triggers are tracked automatically so you can react, an ETF risk analysis model with external factors, all quant graphs and then some, time models with Markov, candlestick patterns, Monte Carlo simulation, walk forward and other approaches I had learned over the years. There is much more.\n\nI know you don't measure a project in terms of lines of code, but these are optimised, verified, tested, debugged and deployed. There are so much features, because I was having fun and got carried away. I'm semi-retired and this is like having my web agency back again.\n\nI used to program in GRASP... I have a data scientist certification, did a lot of Python, Machine Learning, NLP, etc. I really enjoy the prompt based development process as it seems like you are reaching the right resource for your question from a staff of experienced dev. Of course you need to check everything as a junior dev always creeps in when you least expect it. Especially for security. Discuss best practices often and do your research on touchy subjects. Compare various AI on the same topic. GROK has really caught up. OpenAI has slowed down. CLAUDE is simply amazing. This AI thing is work in progress and constantly changing.\n\nI have a noticed an amazing progression over the past year. I have a feeling their models are retrained, tweaked on our interactions even if you asked for them not to use the data. The temptation is too high and the payoffs abound in this market for the best AI tools.\n\nI'm building a code factory now with agents and key checkpoints for every step. I want to remove human intervention from multiple sub steps that are time consuming so I can be even more productive in 2026..."
}
,
{
"id": "46489135",
"text": "Meanwhile, I've been feeling the fun of development sucked away by LLMs. I recently started doing some coding problems where I intentionally turned off all LLM assistance, and THAT was fun.\n\nAlthough I'll be happy to use LLMs for nightmare stuff like dependency management. So I guess it's about figuring out which part of development you enjoy and which part drains you, and refusing to let it take the former from you."
}
,
{
"id": "46489659",
"text": "Going in 2026, the frontend has many good options, but AI is not one of them.\n\nWe have many typesafe (no, not TypeScript!) options with rock solid dev tooling, and fast compilers.\n\nAI is just a badaid, its not the road you want to travel."
}
,
{
"id": "46492871",
"text": "I really agree with this. For me it just feel so much more fun and rewarding to build my weekend projects, especially those projects where I just want to produce and deploy a working mvp out of an idea. If trying out a new framework or whatever I find it quite the opposite though, that AI removes all the fun parts of learning (obviously)"
}
,
{
"id": "46493834",
"text": "so is it fun because you had fallen behind and now you think you can fit with the people with more experience?\n\nwell, I have news for you, the people with experience are also using AI too and they can still produce better and more than you do."
}
,
{
"id": "46495574",
"text": "It sounds like a first april entry.\n\nThings such as:\n\n\"They’re far from perfect, but claude and codex gave me the leverage I desperately needed.\"\n\nYikes. I most definitely don't want AI to take away abilities.\n\nI do kind of approach web development differently. Rather than static\nHTML and CSS for the most part (which I, of course, also use), ruby acts\nas primary wrapper and I treat HTML tags like objects as well as everything\nelse. So I kind of describe a web page on a (one level higher) layer. It\nis not 100% perfect as some things are messy (also due to legacy, some of\nthe code I started writing 20 years ago, updated some of it but other parts\nneed to be upated too, which is only possible when time permits); but even\nwith this in mind, I simply could never go back to using the web with HTML\nand CSS as a primary means to describe web-related content. It would just be\nvery inefficient use of my time.\n\n> When AI generates code, I know when it’s good and when it’s not.\n\nOk - now I know this is a first april entry indeed.\n\n> There’s mental space for creativity in building software again.\n\nWhich, of course, would not make any sense. Now the article is a first\napril entry, but if we were to assume he would write this for real, why\nwould AI have taken away creativity? People can still think on their own.\nIn theory they could have the great ideas - and AI autogenerates all\nnecessary code. So this use case would not be that terrible IF it were\nto work perfectly well. I don't see it work that way right now. AI often\njust is a mega-spammer everywhere. It spams out crap, some of which is\nuseful, but the default is crap.\n\n> AI really has made web development fun again.\n\nNot really. But I also think that the whole web-stack should be simplified\nand streamlined. Instead what I see is the opposite happening. Complexity\nrises. And JavaScript sucks so much it is really unbearable. You can do\nmany useful things in JavaScript, but as a language it is a true clown\nlanguage. I used to think I dislike PHP the most, but I no longer use PHP\nyet I have to use JavaScript. Every second line of code I ask myself why\nthis joke could have ever become popular. Even Java evolved and got better.\nJavaScript appears to have gotten more stupid over the years."
}
,
{
"id": "46491351",
"text": "I've tried vibe coding and hate it. I guess it's okay for people who are only interested in the result, but for me it takes all the fun out of programming. It doesn't feel like it has anything to do with programming at all. I will continue to \"vibe code\" out of necessity - saving time and achieving more than I can on my own. But I cannot possibly understand how someone could consider it fun."
}
,
{
"id": "46491705",
"text": "its also trading one problem for another. when manually coding you understand with little mental effort what you want to achieve, the nuances and constraints, how something interacts with other moving parts, and your problem is implementing the solution\n\nwhen generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly. its a different kind of work, but its still work, and its more annoying and less rewarding than just implementing the solution yourself"
}
,
{
"id": "46492514",
"text": "> when generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly\n\nThis is a great way of explaining the issue."
}
,
{
"id": "46491313",
"text": "I have this suspicion that the people who say they have 10x productivity gains from AI might largely see improvements from a workflow change which fixes their executive dysfunction. Back in the day I never had any issue just sitting down and coding something out for 4 hours straight. So I don’t think LLMs feel quite as big for me. But I can see the feeling of offloading effort to a computer when you have trouble getting started on a sub-task being a good trick to keep your brain engaged.\n\nI’ve personally seen LLMs be huge time savers on specific bugs, for writing tests, and writing boilerplate code. They’re huge for working in new frameworks that roughly map to one you already know. But for the nitty gritty that ends up being most of the work on a mature product where all of the easy stuff is already done they don’t provide as big of a multiplier."
}
,
{
"id": "46495821",
"text": "LLMs as a body double for executive dysfunction is a great insight. I see chronic examples of corporate-sponsored executive dysfunction: striped calendars, constant pings and interruptions, emergency busywork, fire drills. It's likely that LLMs aren't creating productivity as much as they're removing starting inhibition and helping to maintain the thread through context switching. What's presented as a magical tool, which LLMs can be in the areas you mentioned, is also presented as a panacea for situations that simply don't promote good programming hygiene."
}
,
{
"id": "46498827",
"text": "> On the frontend, you have build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, SEO, layout shifts, srcset/responsive images… I remember when the biggest challenge was IE6 compatibility.\n\nI know which I'd choose. In my experience of the IE6 era, tooling was atrocious, and most (all?) cross-browser testing was manual. Varying box models and no devtools? Give me npm framework churn and layers of transpilation any day."
}
,
{
"id": "46495887",
"text": "I spent probably 150-200 hours coding a money management tool in 2022.\n\nThis evening, I worked with Claude to make an AI-assisted money manager that is better than the 2022 version I so carefully crafted.\n\nI had nothing at all this morning and now I have a full database with all my transactions and really strong reporting.\n\nThe word “developer” is about to get a lot more expansive and I think that’s cool."
}
,
{
"id": "46491702",
"text": "What are we all using as assistants? I tend to copy-paste my code into Gemini. I tried some VS-code assistants, but I can't get them to do the thing I want (like look at selected text or only do small things)..."
}
,
{
"id": "46500630",
"text": "AI has increased my productivity in dealing with side tasks in languages/frameworks I'm not familiar with. But it has not made development fun. To the contrary, I enjoy writing code, not reviewing code."
}
,
{
"id": "46488917",
"text": "Strong agree! Forget all those studies that say “but developers are slower” or whatever — I’m actually building way more hobby projects and having way more fun now. And work is way more fun and easier. And my node_modules folder size is dropping like crazy!"
}
,
{
"id": "46489151",
"text": "One thing is true: now I go to the bar with the other guys in the group, drink whatever and let Claude or Codex do the work while I supervise, then merge PR in the morning... I wish I was kidding, but for non critical projects this is now a reality"
}
,
{
"id": "46492961",
"text": "I work at most 3-4 hours a day, and my work is prompting Cursor. Certainly an improvement over suffering 8 hours a day, but still not quite what I'm looking for."
}
,
{
"id": "46489669",
"text": "And im off to the pigfarm showling pigshit and castrate bulls."
}
,
{
"id": "46489637",
"text": "Strong agree. The modern web world is clearly better but we traded a whole lot of complexity for a little bit of benefit (and frequently regressed on speed). The microservices and javascript framework wars were the dark ages."
}
,
{
"id": "46491033",
"text": "More related to the title, i've found the same.\n\nI was always an aggressive pixel-pusher, so web dev took me AGES.\n\nBut with shadcn + llms I'm flying through stuff, no lie, 5-20x faster than I was before.\n\nAnd i dont hate it anymore"
}
,
{
"id": "46494371",
"text": "This sounds like the opposite of fun to me."
}
,
{
"id": "46493482",
"text": "God created men, ~~Colt~~ LLMs made them equal..."
}
,
{
"id": "46489691",
"text": "Really like using alpine with a classical JS server rendered stack too. Most crud apps don’t need a spa app and now you are working out of one code base again. Codex chews through this kind of code"
}
,
{
"id": "46491222",
"text": "it is fun again because we can remove ourselves completely from it?\nseems like web enthusiast are always the first to drop ship huh.\n\"llms good because I no longer have to interface with this steaming pile of shit that web development has become\", not because the web ecosystem has improved by any metric."
}
,
{
"id": "46497416",
"text": "What to keep an eye on is noscript/basic (x)html interoperability, namely a web site, not a web app.\n\nWith a web site and not a web app, you are not dependent on the whatng cartel web engines, in other words, the door is kept opened for small and alternative _real life_ noscript/basic (x)html web engines/browsers (with CSS renderer or not).\n\nOfc, you can have a web app and a web site side by side, usually the web app is built upon the web site.\n\nIn the end, if we are all honnest with ourself, 99% of the time spent on an online service is keeping it available and safe, 1% will be its actual development."
}
,
{
"id": "46489207",
"text": "yeah, I think that too - for me the -Ofun comes from HTMX https://htmx.org and the HARC stack https://harcstack.org so I can server side code in a my preferred programming language hint: not JS (with a helping of LLM on the side)"
}
,
{
"id": "46491256",
"text": "If you have front-end and back-end separate, you're doing web development wrong."
}
,
{
"id": "46493528",
"text": "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\".\n\nAlso, this is a really obvious thing. It's unbelievable how the main way people organize is the other way around."
}
,
{
"id": "46494250",
"text": "But what if it isn't just a basic website? Most sites I've worked on required things like content management, or auditing stuff, a bunch database stuff, SAML single sign on etc.\n\nMost languages end up being better at some parts of the stack, like Java for overcomplicated enterprise BS backends. It seems bad to \"fight\" that trend."
}
,
{
"id": "46494315",
"text": "A full stack framework like Next.js is, at the end of the day, still a server running on Node.js, so there is nothing that prevents you from doing anything that you could be doing with a regular express.js server. Is there anything that prevents you from implementing content management, auditing stuff, or database stuff in your Next.js project? Nothing comes to my mind."
}
,
{
"id": "46491819",
"text": "Totally agree. I've been using blazor server + Claude for project and it just removes all the stupid complexity of having react + a rest API."
}
,
{
"id": "46492892",
"text": "I know right? You can share types, you don't need to glue API, etc etc. Why don't people realize that."
}
,
{
"id": "46494087",
"text": "People do realize that, which is why such frameworks have first appeared decades ago. It's just that you can't fully paper over the network gap and pretend that it doesn't exist; eventually, the abstraction leaks."
}
]
Return ONLY a JSON array with this exact structure (no other text):
[
{
"id": "comment_id_1",
"topics": [
1,
3,
5
]
}
,
{
"id": "comment_id_2",
"topics": [
2
]
}
,
...
]
Rules:
- Each comment can have 0 to 3 topics
- Use 1-based topic indices
- Only assign topics that are genuinely relevant to the comment
- If no topics match, use an empty array:
{
"id": "...",
"topics": []
}
50