> Just like AI is deskilling programming now, JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand.
What does he mean by this? What skills were lost? Writing HTML templates?
Understanding the DOM. Understanding performance. Understanding closures. Knowing how an event bubbles. Understanding CSS… at all.
The effect of this is that people who never learned those things are working with a limited toolkit both in solving problems and debugging. And every so often I get to blow someone’s mind with an old trick :)
It’s not all bad though! I’m happy to never build a layout with floats again.
What does he mean by this? What skills were lost? Writing HTML templates?