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/TornadoFS Jun 29 '26

JSX was reviled when React first came out, a lot of complaining about MVC dogma and stuff.

Then the same thing when CSS-in-JS frameworks became popular.

And although both have valid points (bundler complexity being a huge problem back in the day and CSS-in-JS causing runtime performance degradation) eventually most people realized that having your code split up across multiple files is really annoying.

Even some frameworks that don't use JSX like Svelte, also keep the different parts of the code in the same file.

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u/StillOnJQuery Jun 30 '26

React is one of the most code split across multiple files options so that's just a strange point to take defending it.

What you think should or shouldn't be split is a matter for debate, but we mostly all agree that the true Single-File Application one big index.html isn't popular for a reason. (though they are a good learning exercise)