6 ms·
It really feels as though my 20 year career as a front end developer is coming to a very abrupt end; at least as I have know it these past two decades.
by wuhhh 2mo ago
It really feels as though my 20 year career as a front end developer is coming to a very abrupt end; at least as I have know it these past two decades.
- tripleee 2mo agoI'm envious you got to enjoy it for 20 years
- slices 2mo agoreally? I have yet to see fable or 5.6 reliably generate front end code with correct a11y, for one thing -- does that not matter to the work you do?
- wuhhh 2mo agoIt does matter, but how long do you think it takes to get right? It's a follow up prompt or a few tweaks by hand. I also have an /a11y skill for it that's tailored to exactly the things it sometimes doesn't get right first time round. Further, while it may not one-shot that stuff every time, with a little setup and the right AGENTS/CLAUDE md - it's usually not far off. Another thing that helps is pointing it to patterns in an existing codebase (e.g. "use the box-link pattern for cards, as shown in [..]"). EDIT: The point being that even if they make mistakes that are easy to spot and fix _now_, you'd have to assume that in the very near future those kinks will be ironed out - I mean, the capabilities are only going in one direction.
- morbicer 2mo agoIn 20 years of my career I haven't seen humans generate correct a11y. When prompted and given quality reference (e.g. UK gov design system) LLMs can nowadays beat 19 out of 20 web devs. Thanks out can also hook it to Playwright with Axe and let it run assessments.
- motoxpro 2mo agoI find this hard to believe. All I have to do is give it an example and tell it to go through and add it to the repo and it does it.
- aenis 2mo agoIt does, when you explicitly ask you to do it. Hence the need for experienced devs running those models.
- thefourthchime 2mo agoAll software engineering is over as we know it. I haven't written a line of code since December 2025.
- thousand_nights 2mo agosame tbh but i feel like we're still required, maybe not in the same numbers as before, and our job description has just changed. it feels more akin to an "AI Agent Operator" or something similar. i'm still pretty confident someone like my mom wouldn't be able to do my job even with the same access to all the latest LLMs, so we're still providing some value, just in a very different way. whether the market will reprice the cost of our labor, we will see
- tripleee 2mo agoIf software development were getting easier, first thing I'd expect to see would be a strong downward trend in salaries. Why pay a high mid+ dev rate when a junior+LLM can do the same? That's yet to happen. 90% of software dev skills are still relevant - AI is, for now, just a productivity boost.
- aenis 2mo agoWe have been heavily using agentic coding in my place, and what is emerging is people who used to be tech leads or architects are now back to producing code, and what would require 5-10 people now starts as a 1-2 person project. Some of those have already gone live, successfully, so there will be more of that. Between juniors with LLMs and seniors who don't like AI, I'd hire the junior, but I think the trend in 2026 will be to hire senior people who enjoy producing code with LLMs.
- thefourthchime 2mo agoProducing code is an interesting word because obviously they're not typing code anymore. That's where I've landed. I'm somewhere between 10-60x more productive than I used to be. My day cycles between 3-6 different projects, bug fixes, development cycles. Each one them going ten times faster than I could on my own. We don't even consider bringing on vendors or saas anymore. We only look at our existing vendors and think about getting rid of them. There is a rift though. Some teams are still just "playing with it". Our offshore workers who haven't seemed to increase their velocity at all. In the next couple of years there's going to be a pretty big wrecking. Those that are agentic and those who are not. I always ask myself if I'm still bringing value. But then I look at what I'm talking to the computer about. And the amount of different tech stacks algorithms. Tricky business logic isn't something that you can just pick somebody off the street and do.
- jakubmazanec 2mo agoFrom my experience every (senior) developer with enough tokens always finds useful stuff to do. Some variation of Jevons paradox.
- Void_ 2mo agoI tried making a Things clone yesterday. Spent maybe 7 hours of promoting with Fable. I wanted to get drag and drop right, and I wanted good code architecture to start with. It’s using TinyBase for data storage. Here’s how far I got in 7 hours: https://focuslist.app https://focuslist.app Yes, much faster than writing all of that by hand. But prompting quality software into existence? No way. It would take at least another full time week to finish that app with all the detail I desire.