"Web Development: The Last Bastion of Online Human Expertise"

tags: grumble, grumble

I'm now convinced that the last few jobs left for people will be home plumbing projects and web development. Plumbing is obvious: you've got all sorts of tubes you need to trace around the house and keep liquid inside of.

Web development, however, presents a unique challenge. While browser compatibility issues have improved dramatically since the IE6 days, we've inadvertently replaced one problem with something worse: an infinite number of ever-evolving, ever-breaking dependencies that no AI can reliably keep track of.

Consider Tailwind CSS, the popular CSS framework. In v3, you configured it with a tailwind.config.js file that handled everything from color schemes to breakpoints:

// tailwind.config.js in v3
module.exports = {
  theme: { colors: { primary: '#3490dc' } },
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
}

But in v4? Not only does it handle configuration differently, it silently ignores your carefully crafted config file unless you explicitly load it.

Your poor LLM doesn't stand a chance against these constantly shifting frameworks. Of course, your poor human engineer doesn't fare much better...

And no, I'm not just bitter from spending hours yesterday trying to understand why my Tailwind directives weren't being followed...