allisonre: this that has been making the rounds https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/ i'm always struck by sentences like "the technical barrier went up" that don't attribute what happened to any cause in particular. technical barriers are not agents and they do not go up on their own (nor for that matter are "technical barriers" one monolithic thing that move in a single direction). if you're going to make a plan of action, you have to figure out *who and what* changed (the perception of) "technical barriers"
i think you could make a good case that the "technical barriers went up" in web dev in particular due to the web becoming commercialized: when you're worrying about click throughs and seo and conversion rates, and moving at capital pace, you make code and use frameworks that sacrifice legibility for extraction and dev velocity. view source is useless nowadays because of the buildup of cruft related to those goals (at least partially, imo)
Kilian Evang@aparrish I wonder if there’s also a deliberate deskilling aspect to the promotion of those frameworks
Red_Shirt_no2Encourage junior software engineers to learn how to vibe instead of how to think, make their employers dependent on your LLM, and when things go wrong, they can consult with your small staff of SW engineers who learned how to think — for a premium…
@texttheater @aparrish
“What do you mean we can’t write our software without paying for Claude? Can’t we just hire some SW engineers?”
“The last non-captive one died in 2046. My neighbor’s kid has written a little code on his own, though; it’s kind of a hobby…”
“What do you mean we can’t write our software without paying for Claude? Can’t we just hire some SW engineers?”
“The last non-captive one died in 2046. My neighbor’s kid has written a little code on his own, though; it’s kind of a hobby…”
Irenes (many)@Red_Shirt_no2 @texttheater @aparrish well yeah. nobody designs car engines for fun today
and please note that there was a time when people did
@Red_Shirt_no2 @texttheater @aparrish (the word "car" is load-bearing there. model engineers absolutely design toy steam engines.)
mb21@texttheater @aparrish This. Seems the idea is to hire generic junior engineers or people fresh from a framework bootcamp, and then they don’t have to teach them about browsers and users and progressive enhancement and all that jazz.