Personally at my place, there hasn't been a noticable velocity change since the adoption of Claude Code. I'd say it's even slightly worse as now you have junior frontend engineers making nonsense PRs in the backend.
Mainn blockers are still product, legal, management ... which Claude code didn't help with.
In UI, I’m pretty sure that replacement is already here. We’ll be lucky if at least backend stays a place where people still care about the actual source.
I'd say the opposite, the frontend code is so complex these days that you can't escape the source code.
If you stick to tailwind + server side rendered pages you can probably go pretty far with just AI and no code knowledge but once you introduce modern TS tooling, I don't think it's enough anymore.
There's a lot of good use-cases of Web usb, you can't just cut everything which might have privacy aspects otherwise the browsers wouldn't have canvas or even gpu rendering.
What are those use cases? It seems like a giant hole punched all the way from a tab's sandbox through the process boundary and out to the kernel... Yes, gpu rendering is a great example of the same problem. Canvas at least has some intervening layers depending on implementation.
Almost all of the gui software for programming keyboards with QMK uses webusb or webhid, so you either have to use a chromium based browser or an electron app that is basically just a wrapper for chromium.
Yeah, it's a shame Qt/C++ doesn't have any way of interacting with USB devices and there's no libraries for that, otherwise there could be a native GUI app for QMK. Or failing that, because Qt is simply too difficult for programmers to figure out, maybe some day there will be a way to deal with USB devices from Java, then at least we could have an AWT app (or I guess Swing is the new hotness now?).
pianu.com used to be a website where you could learn piano by connecting your piano through usb with the browser. It seems defunct now but I found a video demonstrating it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTBmRV02NgI
I used something similar in the past. It was a legitimate use case for web usb which changed my mind on it quite a bit.
https://www.charachorder.com/ sells ergo keyboards and allows you to update their firmware directly in the website, through web usb. No local apps at all. Also an improvement in overall security from having to download some .exe / .dmg and running it locally.
> Turns out, an operating system is more than just a kernel with some userspace crap tacked on top, unlike what Linux distros tend to be.
This is also my opinion of OSX, let's not pretend that the userland mess is the most beautiful part of OSX.
Apple has great kernel and driver engineering for sure but once you go the stack above, it's ducktape upon ducktape and you better not upgrade your OS too quickly before they fix the next pile they've just added.
Nobody in their right mind prefer the web apps over the native apps if they sit all day doing e.g spreadsheets. I tried the M365 web app for Word the other day and it's sluggish.
Mainn blockers are still product, legal, management ... which Claude code didn't help with.
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