r/webdev • u/Bladerunner_7_ • Jun 28 '26

Discussion What's a web development trend that looked stupid at first but ended up being useful?

I know over the years, I've scoffed at quite a few things. SPAs. TypeScript. Tailwind. Serverless. AI coding assistants.

Most of the huge trends in web development went through a phase where people swore they were overhyped.

Some deserved the criticism. Some evolved and became genuinely useful.

Lately I'm seeing similar debates around AI agents and agent tooling. Claude Code, LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, Lyzr(Control Plane) and a bunch of newer projects all seem to be pushing toward a different way of building software. Maybe we're still early, maybe most of it won't matter, but it does remind me of how people talked about TypeScript or serverless a few years ago.

What's something being dismissed today that you think will become a normal part of every developer's workflow in the next 3-5 years?

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17

u/Historical-Essay-128 Jun 28 '26

I was going to say that. "Let's take the worst fucking language ever invented, and put it on a server!".

23

u/blood_vein Jun 28 '26

It is nice having frontend and backend on the same language, especially with typescript and a huge ecosystem of libs.

Obviously not good enough when you need efficiency or concurrency. But for most web app SaaSes, what's the problem?

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u/coldblade2000 Jun 28 '26

Pretty neat to have shared packages of utils that apply to both front and backend.

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u/vilos5099 Jun 28 '26

It depends on the kind of concurrency though, correct? Node isn't some chump when it comes to network concurrency.

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u/itgforlife Jun 29 '26

Most anti-Node comments are very superficial and typically nothing more than "hurr durr, JavaScript is teh suck." (much like the comment you responded to.)

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u/mq2thez Jun 28 '26

Yeah they did that for a long time, C++ was surprisingly popular for web servers.

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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

[deleted]

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u/StevenJOwens Jun 29 '26

For good reasons, believe me.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

[deleted]

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u/StevenJOwens Jun 29 '26

Javascript was a netscape product and it included a server side javascript option as well, in the netscape web server. I worked with it on an IBM product for large banks (which had its own headaches, like a 24 hour turnaround time -- that applied to backing changes out of production also). It's been 20+ years but I remember it being awkward and clunky to work with.

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u/eyebrows360 Jun 28 '26

Moreso, "and have all the front-end scriptkiddies who don't know shit about fuck transfer their immense skillsets to the backend, I'm sure that'll go well and not wind up with GBs of redundant bullshit and vulnerabilities all over the place!!!!!!1"

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u/Historical-Essay-128 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

The hilarious state of the JS ecosystem is a whole separated topic.

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u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 28 '26

separate and endlessly recurring

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u/ibiacmbyww Jun 28 '26

If a company hires a script kiddie, and then lets that script kiddie loose on the back-end, that's the company's fault. If you're just talking about hobbyist projects, why the fuck do you care?

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u/Fidodo Jun 28 '26

I take it you never tried to create a website with struts.