Piotr Monwid-Olechnowicz

My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces): I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept): Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow

I will say that almost all the LLM agentic code I have seen, and that includes my own, does not pass my bar. But my bar is lowering because the expectations on throughput are increasing.

I'm not very happy with the code quality and I think agents bloat abstractions, have poor code aesthetics, are very prone to copy pasting code blocks and it's a mess, but at this point I stopped fighting it too hard and just moved on. The agents do not listen to my instructions in the AGENTS.md files. E.g. just as one example, no matter how many times I say something like: "Every line of code should do exactly one thing and use intermediate variables as a form of documentation" They will still "multitask" and create complex constructs where one line of code calls 2 functions and then indexes an array with the result. I think in principle I could use hooks or slash commands to clean this up but at some point just a shrug is easier. Yes I think LLM as a judge for soft rewards is in principle and long term slightly problematic (due to goodharting concerns), but in practice and for now I don't think we've picked the low hanging fruit yet here.

I am a techno-optimist The next few years will see a lot of people's jobs change But I strongly believe the overall rising tide will lift all boats It just requires an open mind to change