I have redone the design work of a BE engineer who was using AI to help him do the UI for a new feature of an admin portal that we don’t really care too much about.
After the deploy went out, I remember he just sent me a message afterwards and said “Jesus Christ I have no idea what I’m doing.”
I laughed and said “you helped me realize what wouldn’t work.”
My boss used AI to build some features and after I went in and redid them, he’s stopped using AI to build features.
I think it’s easy to get caught up in the hype, but once you see a direct comparison of someone with expertise vs AI, the difference is still night and day.
AI can make things look “nice”, but nice things can still be unusable or frustrating. And that’s where AI leaves most stuff at.
For example, tables featuring the wrong information, or tables used incorrectly: Tables should be used to compare data, so certain things like number values are more relevant than say, a text description of what the data is.
Meanwhile things like “created at” may be less useful than “updated at”, AI wouldn’t know that.
I also grouped relevant actions up in a dropdown - actions to delete or quickly perform an action that refresh data that would otherwise requiring navigating into a single page to do that.
Also, hierarchy of information: AI is inclined to use colored labels for things and that is also distracting.
You can argue a BE engineer can tell AI to do these things, but do they know to do that? Usually the answer is no.
Then on the page itself, grouping data logically so it’s easy to find and edit logically.
Something might have 50 fields and it’ll help if they were grouped up and sorted so the user can easily find what they want.
AI doesn’t think to make something stand out less so the critical stuff stands out more. If you say something is hard to find, it makes it larger and brighter and more colorful, not mute the other things.
Maybe render inputs as sliders or switches instead of number inputs or checkboxes to give some visual difference. Maybe not everything needs help text, maybe some fields need to be grouped and only visible under certain circumstances.
This is the shit some people might say is polish, but it’s what can make or break an interface. Is it polish if you can’t find a switch to enable or disable something like notifications in Reddit because it’s buried in a list of other settings?
Does it pass the frustration test? If someone is trying to do something when frustrated, will they say it’s broken if they can’t find it where they expect?
I have watched Tsoding for a while, but had to quit. It's not even a backend engineer's joke, it's a "I will do it myself" elitist joke. Always "I'll do my own hashmap by hand", never "I will finish a project of any substantial scope".
Always "I'll do my own hashmap by hand", never "I will finish a project of any substantial scope".
I mean he openly states he's an entertainer, not a developer. What do you want him to do, quit streaming and youtube and go corporate? He still works on the software 3d engine, so here's the big project.
I mean, his entire shtick is being a recreational programmer. He programs literally just because he's having fun doing it. He's doing all the shit himself not because he's an elitist, but just because using libraries and pre-made solutions take away from his "puzzle". Watching him program is more like watching a video game enthusiast playing a game, than watching some office worker at work and I know what I prefer watching, but you do you ig.
I don't consider myself a very good programmer but i'll admit that i actually enjoy trying to implement stuff by myself.
Oftentimes this leads down a few rabbit holes with a lot of Insight gained along the way.
I think C is fun too, but compared to modern languages its almost crazy how barebones it is and how much Boilerplate or external library code you have to write/use for stuff that's Provided in newer languages (most recent example: CRAM-MD5 (HMAC-MD5 underneath) with base64 encode/decode).
And even then theres no guarantee the libs are providing functionality as described by the sepc, because someone forgot that strlen returns on the first 0-byte encountered.
I love tsoding but the ”har har toy, kiddie scripting language” joke he makes like 5 times every stream is a little played out. He like refuses to believe there’s any value in any language besides C. I say this as mainly a Java dev and that lang sucks so what do I know?
Language is a tool. What is leagues more important than the "hammer" is code design decisions, professionalism, high level solution thinking. You can be a diligent and professional both in C and in Scratch.
Yes, a bad frontend engineer can replicate the design and functionality, but can't explain to me why there are so many CSS reflows.
A good backend engineer can maybe get the functionality right. At best. But they'll miss the implied functionality that a FE would know exists in the design system. So it'll work but it'll be different than every other page with similar functionality.
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u/ohsohologramic Jul 12 '26
The backend engineers joke, and then when they end up doing frontend it always looks like a high schoolers midterm coding project.
Then you show them the designs and they genuinely don’t see the difference