Conclusions

Topics Covered

Quiz Retake

• Closed book, closed note — 20 minutes, 1 point per question
• Covered the most frequently missed questions from Quizzes 1–4

Final Project Requirements

• Well-structured HTML in React (semantic elements, accessibility)
• React Components with appropriate props and state
• Two and a half interactive features — significant functionality
• Routing and navigation — multiple pages with URL parameters
• External React Library — renders a component (e.g., react-bootstrap used meaningfully)
• Firebase data persistence — async work, effect hooks, real-time updates
• Visual style, accessibility, responsiveness
• Correct code style — follow the course textbook conventions

Tool Dependency

• Much of the web is built on shared, reusable libraries — each dependency is a potential point of failure
• XKCD #2347 ("Nebraska"): a single unmaintained project hidden in a dependency chain can underpin critical infrastructure
• Protestware: malicious code added to an npm package (node-ipc) wiped files in Russia and Belarus — illustrates how supply-chain attacks work
• A critical server vulnerability (Dec 2025) spread through a transitive dependency — admins had little warning

Are They the Right Tools?

• The State of JS survey reflects the views of a vocal subset of developers — not necessarily the majority of web users
• Heavy client-side frameworks like React can harm performance for users in low-bandwidth or low-power environments
• A criticism: developer experience tooling is often optimized for the people building it, not the people using it
• The web platform (HTML, CSS, browser APIs) keeps improving — frameworks solve problems that the platform may eventually absorb

Future of Frameworks?

• LLM-assisted development shifts how code is written — agents can generate large amounts of working code without following framework conventions
• AI-generated code tends to be "vanilla" — flat, repetitive, without abstraction — because agents optimize for correctness over maintainability
• Open question: do architectural patterns (components, shared state, routing) remain important when an agent re-implements everything from scratch each time?
• Amazon now requires senior engineers to sign off on AI-assisted infrastructure changes after outages — human oversight remains critical