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)

i can still teach someone how to write html and css and use sftp to upload a website in an afternoon (and honestly css makes this learning process MORE accessible, not less!). but that process is pretty divorced from the main thing people want to use the web for today (make money and run scams)

also! while i'm here! the article says that vibe coding is okay when you're making "tools where you’re the only user, where the stakes are 'my task list doesn’t sync properly' rather than 'customer data got leaked.'" and i think it sucks to downplay the stakes of personal software like this! having a synced task list can be *extremely important* in specific circumstances. and settling for a mode of software dev (ie agentic ai) in which you shrug and say "sometimes it doesn't work" really sucks

@aparrish i'm partial to the idea of "if you're only hurting yourself you can do it however much you like"; otherwise i'd have to get up in arms about many more weird workflows people use than those including AI

@whitequark @aparrish "don't come crying to me when..." in advance can be doing someone a favour though!

@flippac @whitequark @aparrish my buddy has a policy of issuing one warning, telling people the right or safe way to do a thing, then letting them go. It has merits.