AI coding tools are optimising the wrong thing and nobody wants to hear it. Writing code was already fast. The bottleneck is everything else: unclear requirements, review queues, terrified deploy cultures, and an org chart that needs six meetings to decide what colour the button should be.
Every move of the past 20 years has been to deploy code faster, and all it cost us was several hundred times the memory and CPU usage to the point where you need 32 Gb of RAM to open two web pages.
It’s just as stupid as it was when it started.
Write imperative code.
Imperative code has nothing to do with any of that.
Modern frameworks like React and its ilk make up 99% of the overhead and inefficiency of modern web code, and that is all declarative boilerplate. Things that should be one imperative line of code operating on a single html element turn into complete recomputing of every element in a thousand element DOM triggered not by direct invocation, but a global state change.
I won’t get into too much of a rant about this, but I’m in DevOps but I used to be a full-stack dev (as in doing nothing well).
My UI lead is just SO proud that he doesn’t need to write any code by hand and can show you how to do it too! Guess what he doesn’t do? Doesn’t fix up or speed up the website. We integrate with two of our sister products. One of them by sharing our UI packages through our private NPM repo and the other by iframe. Both are done so poorly at a fundamental level because our NPM packages are just SO poorly put together that if you spent any time looking at the output, you’ll see that it’s like typescript but not really. It’s not CJS nor does it really do ESM. Our sister websites needs to use another bundler to import these packages.
Our website is just slow too. Forget about deferred stuff or tighter bundles or reducing the page load times … just putting out more with AI is the key now. Let’s just forget about fundamentals.
the consequences of 20 years of “move fast and break things”: people have to replace perfectly good hardware after 5 years to keep up, and everything’s so broken the literal rocket scientists can’t figure it out.