On the other hand, if it's a CRUD app and you're filtering a list of entities by various field values? Returning that no items matched your selection (or an empty list, if an API) makes more sense than a 404, which would more appropriate for an attempt to pull up a nonexistent entity URI.
I'm maybe less pessimistic, but I expect in the next decade or two, I'm going to spend a lot of time fixing apps that people who were moderately technical vibe-coded years before. They seemed to work well enough until they didn't, and at some point, they became central to the business.
MS Access and so many more "you won't need a programmer again" dev tools over the decades blazed the trail.
> Sometimes when I log into Hacker News, more than half of the posts are about AI.
And I don't ever see it under a fifth, anymore. There is a Hell of a marketing push going on, and it's genuinely hard to tell the difference between the AI true believers and the marketing bots.
It's not a "reminder" for people who've never been to the site before. Especially not when the icon isn't even visible on some devices, like my phone in portrait.
Also, I want it to do everything that this really cool house I saw does. But, I only want to pay for a day or two of labor in order to accomplish every feature that massive contruction project had, plus this one key feature that that house didn't have.
What? You can't do that? My husband/ son/ nephew/ gardener knows how to draw with pencils, I can have them do it if you won't see reason!
On the one hand, I think everyone should try to put together a simple website with a few pages in raw HTML, just to get an idea of how it works. And actual, semantic HTML is not terrible in this day and age, much better than it used to be. You don't have to learn a static generator to put up a website, because you're the static generator.
On the other hand, I've written a lot of HTML since the 90s. And there's a dirty secret behind why so many static generators exist--the effort of slapping together something that builds a site how you want it is similar to learning an existing system. Often, that's a short build script rather than some expansive framework.
> But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.
This is actually why I think more people should learn some coding (and why there should be more HyperCard-like environments for non-professionals). It makes the computer or phone a tool to do the things they want, not just what some programmer in SF wanted to write and try to market.
Looking forward to a brief rush of editorial cartoon-level works doing absolutely nothing not already covered by parody or fair use. Maybe a bad horror or porn movie.
Then nothing, just like happened with Winnie the Pooh.
Really, book covers were getting terrible by the late 90s and early Aughts. I remember the especially cringeworthy period where a few female Asian-American writers got semi-autobiographical books out, and the publishers slapped vaguely arty photos of bowls of rice on them.