alt Hacker News> Once the tooling became too complicated and ever changing they couldn't keep up as front-end dilettante. It required to commit as professionals.
The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.
> You will not learn Grunt, Bower, and a large array of historic tech. You'll go straight for what's relevant today.
which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today
> A lot of the early stuff seems like an utter waste of time in retrospect.
This cannot be further from the truth, if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today. The best front-end devs I know are basically Javascript developers, everything else is "tech du jour" that comes and goes and the less of it you invest in the better off you'll be in the long-run.
> If you knew nothing about LLMs by the end of this year, you could find a course that teaches you all the latest relevant tricks in 5 to 10 hours for 10 bucks.
Hard disagree with this unless you are doing simple CRUD-like stuff
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Yeah, I still get use out of XMLHttpRequest to this day good thing I got in early and variable hoisting isn't gonna get me! /s
A lot of snark aside there's a bit of a false dichotomy (I think) here at work. Whenever or wherever your jumping in point is into $something it will always pay dividends to learn the fundamentals of that $something well and unless you interact with older iterations on that $something then you'll never have to bother learning the equivalent of Grunt, Gulp, Stylus, Nunjuncks and so on for that $something.
With that being said it's also good to put aside time once a year to check out a good recommended (and usually paid) course from an established professional aimed at busy professionals.
As for LLMs I feel it's slowly becoming a thing big enough where people will have to consider where to focus their energy starting with 2027. Kinda like some people branched from web development into backend, frontend and UI/UX a good while back. Do you want to get good at using Claude Code or do you want to integrate gen AI features at work for coworkers to use or customers/users? It's still early days just like when NodeJS started gaining a lot of traction and people were making fun of leftpad.
> The best professionals did not fall for insanity of the modern front-end dilettante and continued hacking shit without that insanitity.
"Front-end professional" and "no tooling" have been exclusive propositions since the early 2010s. You either learned to use tools or you were out of the loop.
> which will be outdated "tomorrow" just like grunt/bower... are looked at today
Not really. Historically, the main problem with front-end development has not been change, but the pace of it. That's how it ties in with the current discussion regarding the (now) ever-changing terrain of LLM-assisted coding. Front-end development is still changing today, but it's coalescing and congealing more than it's revolving. The chasms between transitions are narrowing. If you observe how long Webpack lasted and familiarity with it carried over to using Vite, it's somewhat safe to expect that the latter will last even longer and that its replacement will be a near copy. Someone putting time to learn front-end skills today might reap the benefits of that investment longer.
> if you learned Javascript early, like really learned it, that mastery gets you far today.
I did. I got a copy of the Rhino book 4th ed. and read it cover to cover. I would not advise to learn JS today with historical references. JS was not designed like most other languages. It was hastily put together to get things done and it had a lot of "interesting", but ultimately undesirable, artifacts. It only slowly turned into a more sensible standard after-the-fact. Yes, there are some parts that are still in its core identity, but a lot in the implementation has changed. Efforts like "Javascript: The Good Parts", further standardization, and TS helped to slowly turn it into what we know today. You don't need to travel back in time for that mastery. Get a modern copy of the Rhino book and you'll be as good as the best of them.