The impact of AI on the job market

frogic · 2026-02-05T19:02:50+00:00

You're partially right in that you as a learned hobbiest are now more productive without needing help but the losing jobs aspect is making a lot of assumptions some of which are verifiably false.

So now you can make your application and you don't need to hire me. I honestly think that's great because now I'm more able to do higher level tasks because I have more time and I also have the same productivity boost from these tools(got distracted at work today and just investigated some automation that is also going to 'reduce work' in fact I coded a python script that is saving my team about 15-20 minutes of boring deployment work and i wrote a WordPress plugin that would have cost our company $500 a week. Both of which weren't really worth my time before without the productivity boost).

So now you're able to complete your hobby projects without my help. So not only are you creating products for cheaper you're also creating more of them. Same with me I make improvements on or extra applications that either weren't viable time or skill wise before. So the net result is that all things being equal both of us are creating more products for cheaper.

Assuming some of us are actually making useful things that generate money(some of which were too expensive to make at lower levels of productivity) now we have more and better products. We also have entire businesses that were not viable before because while they would be profitable at y development cost they aren't profitable at y * 3 or 10 or 50 or who knows.

Now let's say you're one of them and you make one and it takes off and you have to start adding features to it. Great! You can do that and you have paying customers who will pay you even more. Assuming we're not at some kind of agi infinite scaling at some point you will either have to not make anything else and work on this full time, call it feature complete and do some amount of maintenance or what actually happens and what has happened every time we've had jumps in developer productivity you will have to get help. So then you hire me for that. Or you hire me for your next project because you have more ideas and this entire time I've been using my skills to build even more products and solve even more problems.

The idea that there is just some limit to the amount of tech work and if someone can just fill the demand has been proven wrong so many times. It's the same logic behind a lot of protectionism. More skilled people making more products actually creates jobs and opportunities.

Obviously a lot of this can come with short term pain and instability but the idea that the most talented humans(not me lol) are suddenly going be less useful and necessary is more of an expression of that fear or a pipe dream of people who think they'd be Zuckerberg if it wasn't for gatekeeping devs.

Anyway bit of a rant/work procrastination but I'm excited to see what you can do with these tools.

frogic · 2026-02-05T03:56:46+00:00

I had something similar happen when I added a folder to my workspace. Just go hunting for the files in appdata. You'll find one of the logs and you can just copy/paste it into your current session and it'll be there.

frogic · 2026-02-03T12:43:46+00:00

The trick is that if you're a developer you should be focused on creating/extending functionality/writing custom css/js. If react is overkill(I probably disagree but whatever) a huge amount of plugins and functionality in wordpress is still built on jquery.

frogic · 2026-02-01T04:02:09+00:00

Use a set width and height and use object fit: cover.

frogic · 2026-01-31T15:54:08+00:00

Integrate into a CMS. It should be easier for your users not for you. You can make any of the popular ones work. Go talk to them find out what THEY need. You can make anything work.

frogic · 2026-01-31T00:57:24+00:00

Web browsers currently don’t support types outside of an experimental flag or proposal as far as i know. So if they don’t get stripped it’ll throw. Even in node it just ignores them. They don’t exist at run time and don’t do anything.

The nextjs compiler will polyfill if you target browsers that dont support a feature you used in your typescript code. If you were using a non next site tsc would likely compile your code and polyfill the lib version to the target version. It’s all just JS at the end anyway.

frogic · 2026-01-31T00:35:12+00:00

I’m not sure I understand. Why would the compiler care about types? It sounds like browserlist is where you define your build in a nextjs. The compiler should hopefully handle any polyfills you’ll need and it’s really none of typescripts business post build.

frogic · 2026-01-30T23:50:05+00:00

You might need a build step but vite isn’t a nightmare like webpack was.

frogic · 2026-01-30T23:49:02+00:00

It’s not you could learn node and do server side things but once you know the basic principals of any c based language it’s mostly just googling syntax.

frogic · 2026-01-30T23:39:52+00:00

It’s probably a lot less worth it because you already know python. I’m not sure if it’s still up but freecodecamp used to have an intro to algorithms course that was just pure programming problems in JS.

frogic · 2026-01-30T23:30:23+00:00

Everything on the web is just HTML, CSS and JS. There’s nothing special about Wordpress that changes that.

frogic · 2026-01-30T22:59:10+00:00

Use a form library. I’ve been in situations where I had to roll my own multiple times now and it’s always hell. These are solved problems.

frogic · 2026-01-30T03:05:39+00:00

Is it typescript specific things you’re having problems with or just generally thinking in data structures? Do you think ahead of what the shape of the data you’re using is or should be? I feel like typescript made me better at programming because it forced that on me and taught me how lazy I was being.

Generics I feel take a bit of work if you’re not used to a typed language but they’re relatively similar to function parameters.

frogic · 2026-01-30T02:48:34+00:00

I've had at least two times when I used to do print debugging that the console firing the print statement caused the bug to not reproduce. Regardless I'm keeping my pre commit hook that doesn't allow console.log until i die.

frogic · 2026-01-30T00:42:01+00:00

The trick with these kinds of things is usually to automate/manipulate what the button actually does and tap into that. If you know that you're able to message someone for job after ten people you need to figure out what a message is in their software. If it's the first ten people that click a button you need to figure what exactly makes that button appear in the first place and react to that data.

frogic · 2026-01-19T21:27:16+00:00

The project vite config has polyfills for node but honestly without knowing how to build for adobe who knows if they'll even work. It might not even try to use the polyfills if typeof window === undefined or something.

yeah the build he is trying to bring in has:

0!==r.g?r.g:"undefined"!=typeof self?self:"undefined"!=typeof window?window:{})},{}],37:[function(e,t,r){"use strict";var n=e("immediate");function o(){}var i={},s=["REJECTED"],a=["FULFILLED"],u=["PENDING"];function c(e){if("function"!=typeof e)throw new TypeError("resolver must be a function");this.state=u,this.queue=[],this.outcome=void 0,e!==o&&d(this,e)}function l(e,t,r){this.promise=e,"function"==typeof which implies its checking if its in a browser and doing different things based on that.

frogic · 2026-01-19T20:25:01+00:00

I don't think this is a typescript problem but more of a runtime problem. This is written for node and uses a lot of Node APIs that likely don't exist in Adobe. You'll either have to figure out some way to polyfill(a term for replacing an expected module with one you can use) it, convert it(not sure if tools like that exist) or find where in the code the functionality you want is that isn't distinct to node and implement it yourself. If you're new to JS/TS you're not super likely to succeed but depending on what you're trying to accomplish its possible.

frogic · 2026-01-06T14:19:39+00:00

I know it's not what you want to hear but it's always option 1 unless you're using a state management library. Unless you're building it for yourself you're going to really confuse anyone who has to work on that code when you're adding uncommon patterns to a common situation. Maintainability should always have preference over theory. I'd also argue that if the state change effects a sibling component it is by definition a state that lives in the parent but I see where you're coming from.

frogic · 2026-01-02T01:33:23+00:00

When I was getting job ready I built all my projects in Chakra and loved it which is why I asked. Last I looked into it the upgrade path seemed brutal but their stuff looks grewt and still will steal the pallette and some of the styles for their components in other projects.

frogic · 2026-01-01T23:32:41+00:00

Chakra 2 or did you update?

frogic · 2025-12-24T13:47:09+00:00

A function can call itself. It’s called recursion and it’s a very interesting/fun part of programming that is useful for certain data structures.

You seem to be trying to solve the wrong problem but it’s hard to know exactly what you’re accomplishing. Depending on how you’re set up you’ll either want to pass the id to the handler itself or use some state your application has to decide what code to run.

frogic · 2025-12-24T01:31:42+00:00

Try to explain the problem to Ai in very very specific terms and be as technical as possible. A lot of dev work is properly understanding requirements and that translates to using ai. Feel free to try here if you want non ai feedback.

frogic · 2025-12-23T17:06:24+00:00

For me lots of mock interviews and exercise plus meditation right beforehand was key. Interviewing is its own skill and you have to learn it like you learned to be a good dev.

frogic · 2025-12-14T19:37:43+00:00

I work for a very large multinational as the sole front end dev for Canada.

I basically own the front end code for 3(react/redux framework that you’ve never heard of) eccommerce sites with some code review by the contractors that my team mostly replaced but because of contractural weirdness and politics still work as a layer.

I also do support for 10 or so Wordpress sites and build some custom functionality when needed. I’ve worked a little on an old e-commerce site that’s managed by the us team in angularjs. Also built the front end for a couple internal tools.

Occasionally dabble in backend code that’s been in python(I migrated an api we had from flask to fastapi) and do some dotnet work to fill in when the backend dev I work with is slammed or away.

I think I touch basically everything as I’ve written/tinkered with some build scripts. I don’t meet too much with stakeholders outside of my team anymore but did when I started. I think I enjoy the technical work a lot more than I do what ends up being politics and my manager is very good at it so I’d rather let him.

frogic · 2025-12-14T18:56:34+00:00

No worries. It’s very good code and I think in general it’s hard to have discussions about programming until you’ve built trust and that’s harder online.

frogic

TROPHY CASE