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octantestoday at 10:52 AM0 repliesview on HN

There is something to this.

But I think at least in front-end engineering, the bigger question is what a new dev values.

LLMs make the browser itself easier to understand in depth, if that's something you want. Building in vanilla-everything, no deps, is now doable at speed and scale for beginners too.

Once you understand the web stack and the principles, you can migrate to any framework and understand their "magic" fast. I think that's not a bad learning path at all, if you use it well, and results in a more competent web-dev than the previous pre-LLM cycle produced.

But if the beginner values output aesthetics and speed more than building their mental model, it is possible to spend years building things without developing any understanding.

For me, at least, the more interesting question is how can we make beginners more interested in the former path than the latter.