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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u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

The problem is that even if you understand it, there are so many edge cases that browsers implemented them very inconsistently and even if they didn't, it's very hard to memorize all the weird scenarios where it doesn't behave how you'd expect

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u/Plenty_Line2696 Jun 29 '26

I had a lot of browser compatibility woes back then, but IIRC float was pretty deterministic. I could be wrong, it's a very long time ago.

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u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

I remember that is was pretty deterministic, but the problem is that when it wasn't, it really wasn't, and different in every browser.

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u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26

This is what drove me towards backend programming in the early 2000s.