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Comment by dtj1123 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that there are now different expectations surrounding velocity and apparent productivity. Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML and other stuff in that domain in addition to actually wanting to wrap their head around it. Nowadays spending the time required to understand how a website works carries a heavy opportunity cost, at least in the short term.

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> Previously an individual new to web development might have genuinely needed to develop an understanding of web protocols, HTML, and other stuff in that domain

That hasn't really been my experience, at least not for a long time (decades+). At least since jQuery's been around. There's always been a large group of people whose approach to software development was basically "run these commands, don't worry about why they work".

The tendency to treat tools as black boxes over time isn't new, I don't think.

A silver lining here is that in my experience the non-curious tended to stagnate over time and the curious tended to succeed, but obviously there's more to it than just that.

An organisation which lets a person release a website without understanding how the web works is just asking for trouble. This was true before Transformer LLMs and is true after them.

LLMs probably just let those organisations make a larger and more load-bearing website faster, so that poor decisions speed the time to catastrophe.

What's changed is the minimum amount of knowledge required to release a website.

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