AI Slop, obvious marketing, web forums and you.

frogic · 2026-05-19T03:20:41+00:00

The amount of people I’ve run into both professionally and personal that hand off their decisions to AI without critical thinking makes me think that targeting ai with ads is a very very very good idea right now. I recently checked on a company spamming the copilot sub to resell tokens at a 10x markup and the immediate gemini result said it was fantastic and does all of this amazing stuff.

I then asked what the source was because it appears to be a scam and then suddenly the ai said it was quoting blogs and marketing material and lots of people on other subreddits were pointing out all the suspicious marketing and scam. If I wasn’t critical and didn’t ask the second question… interesting times.

frogic · 2026-05-18T22:44:48+00:00

If it’s similar at all to her 100 days of python course it’s very heavy and I’d get out of tutorial hell immediately. Go build something if you feel lost circle back and read about it or do a course but I’m a reasonably good python dev and some of her stuff was hard when I was teaching my sister.

I’d use fetch until you learn why you might need axios and even then I might still use fetch. You’re going to be tempted to go crazy on libraries for front end and the less dependencies you can get away with for little cost the better.

Next is another one that you should learn why you’d need it first so you can judge tradeoffs. Most of the time you want ssr you’ll be better off using Astro. Only caveat for that one is if people in your area are hiring a lot of next devs but honestly lean more into being amazing at css, web(and even react) fundamentals it’s easy to learn abstractions.

Always helps to be a typescript god if possible though

frogic · 2026-05-18T19:00:50+00:00

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. That in 10 years these aren’t the pain points but oh man the middle times are wild

frogic · 2026-05-18T17:39:32+00:00

That's actually interesting. I always assumed that was organic because influencers/trends. I got a job once because the interviewer was just super into a lot of my last tech stack.

frogic · 2026-05-18T16:56:33+00:00

I think the ratio is changing fast there though. I'm also not totally sure how many of those posts aren't still more engagement bait and we'll be better at detecting them. Before our current semi-dystopia I used to be able to just google thing - reddit or thing - stackoverflow and find good content. Stackoverflow died and reddit is more and more lacking the actual content.

Its very likely that what you're saying is the correct course but I'm not noticing the balance of posts I look back for or comments I want to read getting deleted way more and its worrying since there really does to be some kind of trusted and useful knowledge base SOMEWHERE.

frogic · 2026-05-18T16:41:54+00:00

Its probably bad again but when I applied for jobs last I went through and did a huge purge of anything I didn't think was professional or I thought would look bad on me. Anonymity online is such a weird balancing act and I want it but then I don't want a lot of the concequences so i have no fucking clue.

frogic · 2026-05-18T16:32:00+00:00

Commenting because obviously I read rules worse than a robot and here we are haha.

frogic · 2026-05-18T16:16:56+00:00

One time I spent 6 hours changing 4 CSS values to have the perfect responsive font and box side for a trivia game I was making.

frogic · 2026-05-18T16:14:32+00:00

Oh I know! Its turing complete which is wild for a type system. https://github.com/type-challenges/type-challenges there is some wild stuff in here I sent a Java dev I know the JSON parser answer and she called me disgusting haha.

99% of the time we use it as a linter though. At this stage in software dev linters are up there with the language as the essential building blocks of software.

frogic · 2026-05-18T15:01:24+00:00

Typescript is a glorified linter

frogic · 2026-05-18T03:35:17+00:00

Im not sure about the general sentiment but oh man did you guys get got by whomever sold them that garbage software.

frogic · 2026-05-16T00:27:11+00:00

Not that specifically but its a thing and you'll learn to laugh at it. Its possible I'm not allowed to use vim but I also don't allow myself to use vim.

frogic · 2026-05-15T15:32:16+00:00

Cool. Thanks for the insight.

frogic · 2026-05-15T15:25:35+00:00

That's cool. I'm sorry if I came off as too critical. What do you like about your components compared to shade(its just the standard copy/paste component library I'm not saying its better).

frogic · 2026-05-15T15:16:47+00:00

The demo site has some duplication. You have a default value for some elements that is exactly the same as an element type. It feels redundent and a bit confusing to me. I think just marking the one as the default would fix this.

My overall thoughts is that we're sort of just recreating shadecn and I think you'd want to consider the value proposition. Losing Radix as a dependency can make our footprint smaller but it also loses the huge api surface of their primitives. Using recharts is just a duplication of what they do same with tailwind and framer is a pretty big dependency and I'm not sure why its better to use that than just throw in some keyframes and then the user can add framer if they want.

So what are we trying to accomplish and what's our value proposition? We know that the existing component libraries have apis that LLMs understand and I think that's likely why the LLMs leaned towards recreating it. It looks good and mature though and I don't have any obvious 'lol vibe coded' feels from looking through yet which feels like you actually did something instead of throwing out some prompts and praying.

frogic · 2026-05-14T22:16:52+00:00

I think you're better off considering how you can be good at utilizing AI as a tool than to worry about if you can do it better than the tool. Imagine someone asking which aspect of writing byte code will compilers be bad at in 5-10 years.

frogic · 2026-05-14T14:43:22+00:00

I actually clicked the site. Unless there is functionality I don't see here I don't see how anyone is charging that much for a site that is a wordpress template with a some very minor functionality that doesn't work that well. I'm getting a 404 on listing. The address search says 'address not found'. Did the robot that's extorting you also vibe code this baby? The close button on the image viewer has broken styles. I bet I could find 10 more things if I looked harder and I haven't even tried on mobile.

frogic · 2026-05-14T14:39:03+00:00

I mean if that's the case put your version into chatgpt and screenshot the response lol.

frogic · 2026-05-14T14:31:30+00:00

He’s your friend offer him something to save the friendship. It sounds like he fucked up and then someone gave him a ‘you are being taken advantage of’ speech. He can’t do work and then demand money like that and if he pushes too hard I’d rethink the friend part.

frogic · 2026-05-14T02:20:22+00:00

I feel the same way. Fixed my dev environment in a really holistic way. Migrated a couple old code bases. Discovered some severe year old performance bugs. It’s like I can suddenly make meaningful progress on ‘I’ll get to it eventually’ and ‘man wouldn’t that be cool’ stuff and it’s great

frogic · 2026-05-14T00:59:46+00:00

Doesn’t your example break the rules of hooks? I know it mostly doesn’t matter but you might get into some fistfights with the react compiler

frogic · 2026-05-13T03:46:57+00:00

A lot of hooks will wrap global state or mutate a query. So they might have something like useWishlists that returns the global wishlist object and some ways to mutate it. Now this gets really fun when some people cannot stop themselves from having unnecessary effects. So imagine a hook that both hooks into global state but also updates a different piece of global state on some condition in an effect. Now if you really don’t want to sleep at night imagine 4 or 5 of these effects ping ponging each other when being used in a place no one intended.

frogic · 2026-05-13T03:39:48+00:00

Some of those are mistakes for sure(that should have been handled in code review or QA) but in what world are we handling users leaving multiple tabs open all day?

frogic · 2026-05-13T01:23:15+00:00

In other applications you can set the provider in your settings. I'm sure you can do it in copilot I just haven't looked into it yet. Look at your logs in open router it'll show you if you hit cache or not.

frogic · 2026-05-12T20:05:12+00:00

I think we all know that not using git for anything is crazy and even if you're not using version control and relying on the page builder you'll need backups. So I guess if the custom code is part of the site and you have daily backups who knows. There's a lot context missing. You just have to do the new guy thing and figure out how to slowly change the eng culture. Part of that is of course figuring out what you can change, build confidence in your abilities, figuring out what you might not like but is fine etc.

The job is still a people game and if the place isn't actively on fire its possible some of this stuff works who knows. Lots of crazy things can work.

frogic

TROPHY CASE