Andrej Karpathy on the State of Web Development

Re:Andrej Karpathy on the State of Web Development by pipes on Saturday March 29, 2025 @07:51AM (#43514759)

Because eventually you end up rewriting a more brittle version of an established framework. Plus someone else may have to maintain it. Working out how your vanilla code works is worse than learning a framework because there's no help.

I lived this with an app made in 2012 that was all custom JS.

Plus how far do you want to take it? Write your own security modules? Create your own anti SQL injection code? The benefit of frameworks is you get free hardened code tested by millions.

But yes, I get it, gluing together Frameworks is depressing too. It just isn't fun.

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Re:Andrej Karpathy on the State of Web Development by zambachi on Saturday March 29, 2025 @08:02AM (#43514821)

JavaScript, HTML, and CSS have changed a lot since 2012.

I think the problem is folks tend to think like engineers with all their widgets (e.g desktop development in the browser). Even Microsoft is going full TypeScript mode.

Web development is DESIGN first. Think of it like a design project and suddenly the entire workflow changes.

The CSS spec today makes all this stuff super easy people just don’t spend the time actually learning.

In my opinion the Laravel and Rails developers get this right.

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Re:Andrej Karpathy on the State of Web Development by techpineapple on Saturday March 29, 2025 @09:48AM (#43515517)

It also leads to the irony that eventually, you’ll build libraries that then have breaking changes and you’re managing both the library and all its versions and the applications that use it.

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