9 ms·

The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

234 points by codechicago277 14d ago

paulpauper 14d ago
Being a programmer in the era of AI now means configuring the AI and run environments to produce the sought result, than manipulating the code itself. It's like how C runs on top of assembly.
- whateveracct 14d ago
  thanks i hate it
- deleted 14d ago
  [deleted]
- j4yav 14d ago
  Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer
  - hirvi74 14d ago
    That is why I am very thankful for my job. We are not really allowed to use LLMs for much of anything.
    - bigstrat2003 14d ago
      That sounds like an absolute dream.
  - chpatrick 14d ago
    Typing the code was never the interesting part.
    - jplusequalt 14d ago
      >Typing the code was never the interesting part. But solving hard problems and developing systems intuition was. If you're trying to tell me that people working on code bases predominantly written by AI are still solving hard problems themselves, or understand the systems the AI is building, I think they're lying to themselves.
      - avgDev 14d ago
        I have a blazor app in poduction, Codex made errors which it could not fix and it required me reading documentation. I won't argue that it didn't make my life simpler, tasks which would take me days are done in hours, sometimes without touching code.
        unshavedyak 14d ago
        Yea, i still deal with a ton of code in AI heavy workflows. If anything the frustrating part is absorbing the code quickly enough. AI (Claude for me) writes in cryptic text and the code flows can often be non-obvious. I need (and am exploring) custom review tooling to improve this AI->Human code flow. Reviewing PRs were always the hardest part for me in programming. They were often full of the developers decisions and you have to rediscover those as you're reading code for it to make sense[1]. However i find this even more difficult to discover these decisions from AI. However unlike human PRs we can ask more of AI. Rarely have i had a developer put on a presentation for a PR - but AI could right? AI could produce a guided walkthrough of the code. Not sure if it will help of course, but my thought is we're all stuck in the old "PR review flow" but instead of PRs it's AI - and the volume of them is far greater than anything prior. So i expect we need to tweak how we review, how we get information from LLMs. [1]: I'm speaking generally, and about larger PRs. Not some small func where you can easily see what it does. Business logic and complex code can be difficult to decipher in PRs, imo.
        othmanosx 14d ago
        I'm building https://pyor.review https://pyor.review to fix this problem, try it out and let me know what you think.
    - qalmakka 14d ago
      For me it definitely was
    - adamredwoods 14d ago
      >> Typing the code was never the interesting part. Code is fascinating! An abstract language to compile to program a CPU. So many ways to do this! Now we're using natural language, which at times is extremely verbose. "[{}]" versus "array of objects", for example.
  - shostack 14d ago
    Being a programmer has always meant dealing with abstraction layers and climbing up the abstraction ladder. You are simply learning a new language, whose syntax happens to look like English (or whatever language you speak), but with new, undiscovered, and constantly changing design patterns and best practices.
    - ahartmetz 14d ago
      Don't forget probabilistic.
    - vrighter 14d ago
      the thing that allowed me to effectively climb higher in the abstraction stack, is to dive lower first.
  - josephg 14d ago
    It depends how much you outsource to the llm. If you outsource everything to a llm, I just don’t think you get very good results right now. Language models aren’t great at remembering all the little design decisions that are needed in medium to large projects. The code ends up riddled with semi-conflicting design choices, which have been slammed together and maintained by context inertia. For a lot of projects this is more than fine - sometimes higher quality work simply isn’t worth my time. But for a lot of projects, you will pay for that slop later. But I think there is a useful middle ground. If you carefully review all the decisions an llm makes, I think you can often be more productive than just programming everything by hand. But it’s a very different way to do engineering. I think I learn more this way than if I program by hand - if only because I’m touching more code. My mind roves around the design space a lot more. I don’t lock in as much as when I’m programming each piece individually. If you work with an llm like this, your engineering skill matters more than ever.
- sitzkrieg 14d ago
  luckily there are still some people who know and care about actually understanding what is happening. but dwindling. market correction needed to wash larpers out
- chowells 14d ago
  It's nothing at all how like C runs on top of assembly. C has semantics. Code means something without ever being run. You can check in your source code and (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. Try checking in only your prompts and nothing else. Just the parts you actually typed. See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code. Do not mix them up.
  - wredcoll 14d ago
    > (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. > See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code I mean... yes, but also no. C is actually a great example. So much of the code we wrote is about manipulating the specifics of that specific computer system we happen to be using at that exact moment. Everything from cpu specific instructions to how the ram behaves or how much of it there is all the way up to how library functions operate at any given point in time. And in relatively short amounts of time, it can all change out from underneath you.
    - chowells 13d ago
      No. C is a language with a specification independent of implementation. If you write correct C code (according to the specification, which no one does), it does not depend on any of those factors. C is almost uniquely bad in terms of accepting broken programs and just compiling them differently. But that doesn't change the fact that the language has semantics, even if most code that violates the documented preconditions those semantics depend on.
- crnkofe 14d ago
  Lots of people mention this higher abstraction level but its not really the case. C has a grammar. You write C and get C as output. Assembly is hidden from the user. Natural language also has a grammar ("sort of"). You write prose into your preferred cli/app of choice BUT it outputs code in C or other language. So its basically a code generator. A code generator is not even remotely a form of abstraction. Its just a facade that breaks down as soon as the generator fails to produce a meaningful result.
comrade1234 14d ago
My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's still experimental). She just provides the current website, tells how she wants it to look and it works great. I mean it's obviously ai generated but she gets quick results and is able to tweek things to look better by just telling deepseek what to do. She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. This is a simple example. Basically it's one of those earlier jobs that you could get someone to bid on for $x but now you can do yourself for $20.
- latchkey 14d ago
  i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough. the fact that your wife can be productive at lower cost means that more products will be built and more opportunities will be made. instead of spending money on website design, her business can spend money developing biotech. i welcome that, even if it means that things will change from the past and those that have made a career out of charging thousands will get replaced by a $20/month subscription.
  - throwayay4929 14d ago
    Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI
    - latchkey 14d ago
sitzkrieg 14d ago
writing about your dates with an ai prompt are not that interesting
rudi-c 14d ago
In a related but less public way, I've found myself less motivated to write internal documentation at work. It feels like in a lot of cases, it'd be better for the reader to throw Claude at the codebase to explain things. A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. While I'm quite good at highlighting the most important insights and non-obvious traits of a system, I'd still be guessing what the reader needs from my doc at the end of the day. Claude can answer questions based on what the reader is curious about and wants to learn. Some types of document are still useful, namely higher-level directional or philosophical topics about the intention of a codebase. e.g. "we would like to eventually move X system to Rust for Y reason", "we chose mutable data structures over immutable in this part of the system because Z". But fewer than before.
- kolinko 14d ago
  Even the latter can be done automatically from meeting notes, tickets etc.
- patcon 14d ago
  Yeah, I feel similarly, and kinda grieve how this is not longer a valued skill... I think I've cultivated my taste in many important social dimensions through thinking about what is important to leave in docs and in a note. It's a little strange to know that rarely will people do this work of honing this sense anymore...
- AdieuToLogic 14d ago
  > A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. Good documentation does not explain "the how", it captures "the why."
jdw64 14d ago
[dead]
pmestha 14d ago
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Supermancho 14d ago
> The frontend is less risky to just hand to an agent. The smaller the problem, the less risky it is to do this, regardless of the nature of the problem. This is not a frontend-specific issue today.
- josephg 14d ago
  Frontend development - perhaps more than any other kind of software development - is “what you see is what you get”. There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken. Systems engineering isn’t like that. Vibe coders beware: A database could silently corrupt data, or have latent security vulnerabilities. It might have a badly designed query language that will be difficult to change later. But frontend code can be rewritten at will. It’s a perfect target for LLMs.
  - Gigachad 14d ago
    At the same time I have found LLMs far less competent at frontend because they don't seem to have any visual understanding of what a good website looks like.
    - bschwindHN 14d ago
      Similarly for how things feel, like animations, physics, controls, etc. That's one reason I don't think agents will be creating games anyone wants to play, any time soon (unless they just straight up copy an existing good game)
  - owebmaster 14d ago
    The UX is what makes the users use the apps, systems, games, their phones.
  - atomicnumber3 14d ago
    "There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken." ??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states. I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."
tuesdaynight 14d ago
In my useless opinion, most people are not aware of how big AI is and how bigger it will be in 3~5 years. It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem, but there are people who are completely blind about it
- iAMkenough 14d ago
  > It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem Like hunger and diseases are global problems not to be worried about.
  - dsiegel2275 14d ago
    I think they meant more along the lines of "This narrow problem today is not worth worrying about, because soon it will be a larger and bigger problem. "
    - bluefirebrand 14d ago
      That's still a silly argument though How about we worry about this smaller problem today so the bigger problem tomorrow is less big. Or doesn't materialize at all? Do we have to sleepwalk off this cliff?
      - tuesdaynight 8d ago
        I agree with you, but have you tried talking to people in real life about it? Almost nobody cares. If someone asks about it, I give them what I believe. I don't want them to take my words as truth, but I hope that it makes them research something, at least. If you are luck enough, 5% of people will do that, and the conversation will be possible. Tech people give you better odds, but you still will find that most believe that AI is useless for something that you know that it's totally capable of doing. Damn, the last one I talked said that "Fable can't even do React"
  - deleted 14d ago
    [deleted]
Insimwytim 14d ago
Prompt: Answer without searching the internet: Woah! Must it discard all pre-training as well? It already slurped "the internet". You can't seriously say it doesn't count!
- jareklupinski 14d ago
  there seems to be at least one service that your LLM can find if it searches the internet (e.g. in my case "best rental API") that poisons your context into thinking that that one service is the definitive and only available API for that data
rickbergfalk 14d ago
> Meanwhile, Cursor and Viget have blogged about migrating their codebases from Solid and Lit, respectively, to React. That was maddening to read. Here I was thinking we should all be migrating to better performing frontend solutions. Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX?
- ramraj07 14d ago
  At least last year most agents wrote materially worse code in htmx.
- owebmaster 14d ago
  > Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX? Definitely not. That's skill issues. The shadow DOM can be a bit tricky.
stickfigure 14d ago
I offer this, as someone who is heavy into AI development (as a coding assistant, not vibe-coding). I was pretty fast before and now I'm easily an order of magnitude faster. * I scrutinize every line of backend code and frequently make revisions. * I pay just barely enough attention to the frontend code to make sure it's not doing anything dumb. * I pay zero attention to the CSS. Either our expectations for UI interaction are going to go up a lot, or FE devs should start looking at product management roles. I think the asteroid metaphor is apt.
kypro 14d ago
As someone who loves FE the slop people are pushing where I work is really quite upsetting to me. I reviewed some code earlier which clearly wasn't intended for consumed by humans and I know with certainty this dev wouldn't have understood 90% of what that code did. It looked like hours of Claude trying to force square into a round hole tbh, but it worked. Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. If Claude can maintain it then who cares... Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world. I wish it did matter of course, but like most of coding these days, it just doesn't.
- bigstrat2003 14d ago
  > Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. You absolutely should've rejected it. Putting slop into production is a huge trap, because now the humans can't understand it and the LLM is just going to make it worse and worse over time.
  - sci_prog 14d ago
    I think what OP is saying is that the fact that a human can't understand it won't matter as the code will only ever be read by AI.
    - kypro 14d ago
      Yes exactly. I think we all understood at a high-level what it was doing. The issue I had was that it was doing a lot of weirdness like using `Object.defineProperty` to try to force an existing library to do something it wasn't suppose to do. No human would have written that code. Although I generate most of my code with AI I still personally try to keep it understandable by a competent developer. Where as most people on my team are not good at FE so they just trust the LLM to get it right. But ultimately it just doesn't matter anymore.
- lnrd 14d ago
  > Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world. Last week alone I was unable to access two major websites because their auth flow was broken (I was attempting to log in with Apple, so not "the happy path"). I was just locked out, had to contact support. I guess this mentality is what causes it. We had safeguards and best practices built over the years of learnings to avoid introducing these kind of regressions. And we threw them away in half a year to...gain some productivity in delivering features that most likely the users don't even want.
atomicnumber3 14d ago
"Note I’m not saying there are zero risks: the agent could mess up accessibility, it could cause an infinite loop that blocks users, etc. But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse)." This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just for the record, I'm a backend dev. So I don't have much stake in this game. This idea is, of course, not uncommon. "If the backend has to treat the frontend as adversarial anyway, and has all this cool stuff (constraints etc) for guaranteeing consistency of the system, then the frontend can just do whatever, right?" It plays into a lot of biases around typical frontend devs, typical backend devs, language stereotypes, etc. So it _sounds_ good. Let me tell you for a moment about one of the spookiest bugs I've seen. It was an app for sorting personal photos. You'd upload pics/vids off your phone, they appear in the UI, you click a folder for them to go into (or click delete to discard), etc. Simple app, right? Well, naturally, pics from even vaguely modern phones are regularly 5MB or more. Not really something you want to sling around while a user is browsing and their main activity is going to be looking at said pic to decide what folder it goes in (or if it gets deleted). So we thumbnail. And the main app only ever shows the user the thumbnails. The backend organized things quite simply: it gets a list of images from the frontend, it assigns each of them a zero-based index, and generates a thumbnail you'll also access via index. Imagine a URL scheme like `images/0` and `images/0/thumbnail` serving the real assets and the thumbnail. Well, this app had a bug at one point. The backend was indexing by the arbitrary order the user uploaded them in. The frontend was mostly doing this too. Unfortunately the logic for thumbnails was incorrectly indexing by the "taken time" (which was a post-upload timestamp constructed by looking at basically every available timestamp and picking the "best" one. i.e. hopefully the one the iOS camera app adds, but obviously pics come from other places too and you never know what a user will upload). The end result being users would upload pics, see a thumbnail of an accidental pic they took of their shoe, hit delete. But actually they were deleting a pic of their baby or similar. Literally none of the testing caught this for 2 main reasons: headless tests don't look at images, and you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image") (at least not easily... i guess image models could do it now? but probabilistic? not a word i like in my unit tests? I digress, this predated the current crop of "AI"). Now let me generalize: your frontend isn't just a weird way to call RPCs on your backend. It's part of the application. I don't think you can just hand-wave. And as we saw above, you can't even say "well the frontend is stateless! any bug is 1 deploy away from fixing!" - deploying the frontend didn't get anyone their baby pictures back.
etoxin 14d ago
I was originally a Flash developer, when that died when Steve Jobs banned it from iPhones, I pivoted to frontend. I got to see web evolve over the next decade or so and loved every part of it. Now, still as a frontend engineer albeit much more senior. The writing is on the wall, again. It's time to reskill for AI. It's not bad news. We as experienced engineers are needed to help build in the guardrails, frameworks, the new tooling, etc. There is a lot of work that is needed that requires actual engineers with technical experience. Like the early internet, I see this as a new beginning and we get to decide how it evolves.
- livinglist 14d ago
  I think that is the nature of being a software engineer, even before AI you had to keep learning new libraries/SDKs/APIs/languages to keep up with the industry trend. I think it will remain the same in the age of AI, good engineers will adapt.
  - mettamage 14d ago
    IMO the reskilling is not that hard. Leetcode and applying for jobs has been way harder. In fact, the AI reskilling has been a boon for me. Suddenly I'm able to get a job way more easily and get to call myself a senior, all of a sudden. And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time [1]. So yea, I really welcome the change. [1] What I mean with being a generalist: Did iOS dev as a student, web dev bootcamp instructor, teaching assistant (programming), teaching fellow (programming), found some SQL injections + docker vulnerabilities + replicated rowhammer with WebGL, did a lot of full-stack engineering (5 years), did a UX bootcamp, studied 2 bachelors + 1 masters + research master which is 2 years (psych, business, CS and game-design). Each full-stack engineering job was in a different language (C#, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Pharo/Smalltalk, currently JS & Python).
    - larsfaye 9d ago
      >And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time I was just speaking with my wife about this a few days ago, that I am actually happy that I didn't specialize in one specific discipline, or rather spend my time around learning a little bit of everything, which now gives me the foothold into any direction that I want to go.
thelastgallon 14d ago
I can't wait for the asteroid to hit C-Suite and senior execs. These are the most meaningless jobs and easiest to automate, with the most cost savings.
- rk06 14d ago
  beware! using AI for middle management is how you speedrun to dystopia. Bad Managers can be fired, good managers can manage up. on other hand, "bad" AI will remain and continue to be dystopic, and "good" AI will be killed by higher management for being not being a doormat.
  - ryathal 13d ago
    C suites typically aren't middle management though.
- seydor 14d ago
  The csuite has the power to keep AI away from it or make itself mandatory.
- derekdahmer 14d ago
  You would prefer the company that employs you be run by AI rather than humans?
  - tonyedgecombe 14d ago
    I suppose that depends on how dystopian you think current middle management is. I've had managers that were deliberately malicious, AI would almost certainly have been better in that situation.
- ThrowawayR2 13d ago
  The CEO takes their orders from the board of directors representing shareholder or directly from the owner(s) of the business. Even if such a thing as an AI CEO were possible, you somehow think the owners/shareholders are going to command the AI CEO to be any less profit focused and efficiency focused? An AI CEO would have even less qualms about doing benefit cutbacks, layoffs, and squeezing employees because it's just a LLM in a trench coat. If you want to fight businesses, you need to have some kind of a clue how they work.
cube00 14d ago
> If you write a React component with an agent, though, then the risk of just yolo’ing it into production is (typically) much lower. If your state management gets out of sync with the form controls your users are working with it can become pretty high risk because now users see one thing and something else actually gets sent to the backend.
- ramraj07 14d ago
  If your coding agent screwed up so bad that wrong data is being shown to the user, in August 2026, thats more on the prompter than anything else.
  - geraneum 14d ago
    But the prompter is supposed to be someone who doesn’t know web dev. That’s their selling point.
gedy 14d ago
Maybe I'm an outlier here but I moved into front end to steer products and the resultant architecture into making sense from the incomplete or contradictory "requirements" we got from product and even UX. I've been doing this for over 20 years and every company has needed good engineers to make the product a logical reality. LLMs piping out UIs from PM prompts aren't solving that imho.
- leptons 14d ago
  I spent 2 years developing and polishing a front end web application, and then some other engineers at my company pointed Claude at it to try to reproduce it. The slop it crapped out would make most if not all our users leave for the competition. Then they had the nerve to ask me to explain what was bad about the sloppified version. I'm looking for a new job.
- borzi 14d ago
  I'm a backend engineer working closely with a single frontend guy on an internal app and after creating a pr in his repo, it was immediately clear that AI can build some nice brochure sites, but UI state management, clean UX, good performance and API dispatch handling still require you to know what your doing for things to work well. I think that frontend devs merely have to move from debating their frameworks to focusing more on user problems, maintainability, performance etc. but that is every dev right now...
CqtGLRGcukpy 14d ago
There is going to come one day that companies (and any website owner) will wish they didn't use AI and instead used a simple (maybe even plain-text) website. That will come when people really need information from that website but can't get to it. https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performance https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performan... Discussion regarding that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734
- hexapus 14d ago
  I wish that was the answer to all of these people setting their spouse, their grandmother, their boss loose with LLMs to build sites. It should just be acceptable to have a simple site that conveys information well, and then we wouldn't need to boil the seas to generate pages of shiny slop.
- tommica 14d ago
  Absolutely this. Although I like the shiny and polished looks, getting the info out is the most important, and it is hard yo beat pure black-on-white text
- jjpones 14d ago
  Heck, you can have your information as clear and concise as possible, but the moment I sense that "AI-generated" texture, I am immediately closing the tab. This is just extrapolating from how I feel about the bevy of obviously AI-Generated flyers and banners that have been gaining a lot of traction in real life.
- flyingshelf 14d ago
  Doubtful. This is just the cost of doing business. 99.9999% uptime for a fraction of the cost is totally fine for all businesses. Government should be the exception though.
- kozikow 14d ago
  I've seen some websites now just serve separate md endpoint (for agents to read) I even ended reading those instead of main "interactive" websites myself As agents are not great at navigating react either, this will catch on and you will have what you want
chanux 14d ago
> For better or worse, React is heavily overrepresented in the training weights, and “agent experience” is starting to matter more than developer experience. Another winner takes all situation. This and the other post on agent tool use[1] makes me think we are in a period of great homogenization. I'm sure there's a group that's delighted about this but for me, it just makes me feel a little uneasy. [1] https://armature.tech/blog/which-tools-coding-agents-install https://armature.tech/blog/which-tools-coding-agents-install
- redwood 14d ago
  See https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02209 https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02209 but I hope researchers are looking to tackle this problem
- cookiengineer 14d ago
  > period of great homogenization It's called alignment. And that's the correct word for it in my opinion. The most important part is that we have to find a way to tackle the knowledge enshittification problem. Because now that slopcode and slopposts are everywhere, the average quality level will decrease. We had the peak internet knowledge, and it's now gradually getting worse. That's not a personal opinion, that's how attention matrixes and their keys/values computation works.
  - skew-aberration 14d ago
    It was once called 'natural monopoly'
  - bluefirebrand 14d ago
    > It's called alignment Alignment is such a polite term for "a giant boot that is crushing all of the uniqueness out" Once it is done crushing, congrats! Everything is aligned.. by being flattened
    - bhawker 14d ago
      Does the world need the "uniqueness" of 40 similar web frameworks?
leptons 14d ago
>But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. Tell that to Digg. If you slop oit a front-end, your users will leave. It's that simple. The front-end is the part the users use the most, nobody cares how "elegant" your APIs are, or what kind of database the system uses. The front-end matters to users, a lot. I've seen AI take a perfectly good front-end and slop out a piece of crap that will make the users leave in droves. And when nobody raises their hand (or in my case, everyone else is in the grip of AI psychosis) then bad times are ahead.
- rglover 14d ago
  Yep. I don't know why this is so hard for teams to understand: if the part your customers pay you to interact with (the UI/UX) doesn't fucking work, your customers are going to leave. We need to kill this two-party-system-brain crap and siloing front end and back end. Learn both. It isn't difficult. It allows you to design much better systems that avoid complexity and unreliability.
  - leptons 14d ago
    I honestly think specializing in front or back end is a good thing. Sure, it does help to know both, but there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. I'm full-stack leaning towards front-end, and working on a personal project I know where the back-end is lacking. The front-end is pretty great but not as great as it could be if I could focus all my skill only on front-end.
    - rglover 13d ago
      > there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. If I can do it, others can do it, too. I even built an entire full-stack framework (w/ a custom components system + Node.js back-end), deployment system, database, and CSS framework (and now those all run my businesses). When I started, I didn't have the slightest clue beyond some basic HTML and CSS. I think people limit themselves too much trying to fit into the narrow containers of a job title/description. I get why, but it's worth asking yourself what else you're capable of beyond your job if you're eager to learn.
4petesake 14d ago
Looking forward to that entry level laptop with 128GB RAM
josefrichter 14d ago
You can pivot to design systems. I believe they’re 80% development problem and just 20% design problem really.
anilgulecha 14d ago
> So where does this leave frontend dev education? I think this is more generally, > So where does this leave education? We need to figure this out anyway, because gpt galaxia and gpt cosmos will mean no skill is worth learning functionally. The law of 42: Any debate regarding artificial intelligence and human skill will inevitably collapse into a discussion on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.
- mettamage 14d ago
  Currently (re)learning my math fundamentals and it is indeed frustrating to see that Fable 5 has everything correct. It reads my scribbles and then tells me whether my answer is right or wrong.
- Gud 14d ago
  Hard disagree. The AI is a fantastic assistive tool, and in many ways it surpass my skillset as a software developer(I'm a skilled software developer, although it's not my job). However, I do not believe I would be able to build what I'm building using LLMs, without myself having the right skills.
  - fmpfmp 14d ago
    you forgot a 'yet' somewhere in the last sentence of your comment.
    - Gud 14d ago
      No, I didn't forget anything. Don't put words in my mouth. I do not believe random Joe, even an intelligent one, will be able to build advanced software using LLMs in the near future.
larodi 14d ago
We gave a university class called "Advanced JS" and it was going for more than 13 years. Some years we had 30, others 50, recently more like 18 students. In 2026 though, I see very little reason to continue to do so. What am I going to teach them? How to run Codex or CC? Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? We have always considered ourselves forward-thinking with live coding, paired programming, AI-assisted visual artefacts. And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided we stop giving these lectures. Everyone autodidact themselves, I dont care anymore.
- embedding-shape 14d ago
  > And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Personally, I felt similarly once the people I'm mentoring started using CC and Codex and similar stuff, as a lot of the questions they asked me were easily answerable by the agent, so I guess I had a brief moment of "But what value do I even provide in the world anymore?". I ended up kind of restructuring what I'm trying to teach, and instead of getting them more exposed to the mechanics of software engineering, I've started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, all still related to software engineering of course, but I basically try to ask myself what I can teach them that no agent/model could, and do that stuff. I even started introducing mentees to each other (not sure why I didn't before but alas), and have them collaborate on projects together, and figure out what works/not in collaborations with others, as no model can teach you that, as just another example. It's surfacing a whole new host of issues to work through, so seems to work fine :)
  - whizzter 14d ago
    > Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping up on basics or tedious tasks makes the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.
CodeCompost 14d ago
From one of the links in the article (https://exploringjs.com/ https://exploringjs.com/): > The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026). Oof that hits hard. I'm not an author or anything like that, but wow.
Ylano 14d ago
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austin-cheney 14d ago
Hasn't poor training always been the status quo? It's not just the front end, and its not just JavaScript. It's the web application space in a more general sense, because I am also looking at all those Java developers maintaining legacy web applications. In fact this reminds me of my last face to face interview. The employer wants to stand up a new enterprise SAAS solution from scratch in TypeScript to rid themselves of a costly venture. The idea is absolutely solid and the financials make complete sense on both ends. But... Supposedly there is an urgent need to fill that position and yet months later the position is still there and vacant. The problem is that there are exceptionally few people who can write original applications from the ground up in JavaScript/TypeScript in the world of corporate employment. Yes, yes, there are trillion fantastic open source applications written in these technologies, but businesses just can't do it. Secondly, the compounding factor, is that they don't know how to interview for it because almost nobody in the corporate employment space knows what it looks like to write an original application. That is not a technology problem. Its an institutional and culture failure and it isn't new. In the web space if you want to be a real programmer you do it for free on your own time because your employed time is prioritized with putting text on screen like a beginner.
sdcfgy 14d ago
I worked for web SaaS companies for a long time because money. I saw this coming when React came along. No one knows or cares about the whole stack. Training adapts to the market. Knowledge is lost. I got out before this. My new role since 2020 doesn’t go near the front end. I don’t know anything about React. I don’t know what the state of the art is on the front end. I have actually come to despise the “new” web. Alas so have our customers in recent years because the user interfaces are generally a lot less suited to LOB applications. Everything is too large, too generic, no visual cues, nothing works with the keyboard. Now everyone is building swathes of this stuff because LLMs can crank out new user interface fast. Our endpoints have multiplied, ROI has declined. I had a customer the other day say they wish we still distributed our Visual Basic application as it was much simpler and easier to use. That was a real eye opener for me. This is the asteroid we need to keep an eye on.
- tonic_note 13d ago
  A huge aspect people miss about being a good FE is product sensibility. There is inherently some overlap between what an FE does and a designer does - think about how the product should behave. If you just hand the FE over to an LLM you will get the lowest common denominator UX. It will "get the job done" (hopefully) but it will never feel great to use, because figuring out what makes a product great to use request empathy, imagination, and experience, things that apathetic front ends lack. The AI can make an excellent frontend, but only if told what to do and what to look for. It will miss a ton of UX best practices unless explicitly prompted. This is why I find the contempt for frontend engineering so maddening. It's based on such a shallow understanding of what the job actually is. It's so much more than just "make it look pretty"
icar 14d ago
I have been having huge success with CC and HTMX+Go. Not even tailwind. It made me never want to touch React again; it eased my way into the simpler stuff.
BatchJob 14d ago
The asteroid is the author and his horrible attitude towards software development. People giving in like this is an indication that they really didnt have much to offer in the first place and viewed "dev experience" as he puts it as just some way to be clever. Also when someone says something like "I literally worked on a browser performance team", using the parlance of a middle school cheerleader to describe that work, I dont have a feeling that these experts bowing out is really going to have much impact. In general, I have always felt UI, and UI adjacent developers to be the least serious of us and this article backs that up.
dzonga 14d ago
a lot of educators in the frontend space are very good and had excellent material e.g Dr Alex. before 'A.I' - frontend was a tarpit - very few people did it well specially with SPA frameworks. There was always something broken whether due to state mismatch or something else. the state management libraries didn't help either with most of them being so complex. HTMX etc were a reaction to that complexity. Then add performance stuff - very few people had the skills to solve for that too. now with 'A.I' - most of the educational material has either been taken offline due to 'A.I' scrappers, the llm's tend to hallucinate - so how are we gonna nurture talent to become experts. One thing I give to llms though - is that they're very good at plain javascript, decent at the frontend frameworks. But complexity around frontend work still remains - with 'A.I' generated code & devs who don't understand how to fix stuff - just a disaster waiting to happen.
NoDodgeQuestion 13d ago
Already knew before AI, frontend is easy, only difficulty memorizing trivia.
crackinmalackin 13d ago
The front end is not less risky to hand to the agent. There are a thousand different ways the agent could bork the UI and say it's good. And knowing how to babysit the AI/Agents doing the UI is more important than ever. Yeah I agree that developer education in the front end space seems to be diminishing, but let's not pretend like non of that matters anymore.
- segfaultex 13d ago
  Yeah, I think what gets lost in the corporate AI convo is that it accelerates impact; for better and worse.
zhivota 13d ago
These articles make me wonder, are we driving ourselves into a local maximum of progress? If people move to React because agents know React, will the next better framework ever get traction? Extrapolate this thought to more than just front end dev, especially because we'll have fewer actual practitioners to invent the next framework. Maybe the agents will do it for us I guess?
- perrygeo 13d ago
  Or another angle - will we even need a framework? Frameworks exist to give humans better a better interface for common patterns. But LLMs can find and replicate patterns all day in vanilla Javascript without getting bored or annoyed by bad ergonomics.
- ivandenysov 13d ago
  The big bet is that the LLMs will get good enough to invent new frameworks or even branches of math. I hope it pans out. Otherwise we will get stuck in a local maximum for a while. On the positive side We won’t get the cars, but our horses will be damn fast ;)
tracerbulletx 13d ago
This is what I mourn the most too. The collaborative teaching and mentoring relationships. Not just for front end. Covid and now AI has just obliterated the software meetup and teaching space.
kerhackernews 13d ago
The fear I have is that everything will become the same... boring. AI will suck the soul out of everything it touches.
- yomismoaqui 13d ago
  As if trying to make CSS behave or fixing the breakage introduced by React N+1 was the definition of fun...
mpweiher 13d ago
I think people overestimate the effect of representation of specific programming languages or frameworks. I had Codex or Claude create simple web apps for me in Objective-Smalltalk. And it did a good job. I am pretty sure that Objective-Smalltalk web apps are so underrepresented in the training set as to be almost or even actually nonexistent.
- porridgeraisin 13d ago
  Yep. It's not that important unless you're really just relying on one shot responses.
amiantos 13d ago
The threads in here really make me wonder what the endgame is for people who have surrendered to pure doomerism. Saying stuff like "ai will suck the soul out of everything" is such a defeatist standpoint to take, but I see it all the time, like authors who say AI has devalued writing and there is no reason for them to write anymore. It all kind of goes back to the classic argument that if anyone can do the thing that you think makes you special, you are no longer special. But that's not true, it is the self that makes anything you make special. If you're using AI tools to achieve your vision, then your thing is special. But it seems like the assumption is that no one cares about making good things, people will just make bad things, and everything will be ruined. That's just not true. Digital photography did not make all photographs bad, because taking a photo became too easy. Same for switching from typewriters to computers with spellcheck. I just don't really get the intense pessimism overall. If you only liked doing the thing because other people couldn't do the thing, did you even like doing the thing to begin with? Or did you only like doing the thing because you thought it said something about you as a person? This is probably at the root of all gatekeeping behavior, really.
tonic_note 13d ago
People have been saying AI will come for the front ends first and yet, at my company, 100% of the BE is generated. They do not write a single line of code by hand. Yet every FE has to do the last mile of UI by hand, because the models still cannot replicate a figma spec with perfect accuracy. Now mind you the FEs will still be cooked in the end because Eng leadership is overwhelmingly tilted towards backend devs, who will protect their own. I think we'll end up seeing a lot of janky UIs because most backends find the act of polish and pixel perfection beneath them and they'll increasingly be doing more FE work.
scotty79 11d ago
Paradoxically, front-end is holding well enough because that's the spot in software development where taste matters the most. The models can't just rely on text processing. The models need vision, computer use, and critical artistic taste to make good front-ends. We'll get there eventually, but later than with the rest of software development.

234 points by codechicago277 14d ago

Being a programmer in the era of AI now means configuring the AI and run environments to produce the sought result, than manipulating the code itself. It's like how C runs on top of assembly.

whateveracct 14d ago
thanks i hate it
deleted 14d ago
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j4yav 14d ago
Being a programmer in the era of AI means not being a programmer
- hirvi74 14d ago
  That is why I am very thankful for my job. We are not really allowed to use LLMs for much of anything.
  - bigstrat2003 14d ago
    That sounds like an absolute dream.
- chpatrick 14d ago
  Typing the code was never the interesting part.
  - jplusequalt 14d ago
    >Typing the code was never the interesting part. But solving hard problems and developing systems intuition was. If you're trying to tell me that people working on code bases predominantly written by AI are still solving hard problems themselves, or understand the systems the AI is building, I think they're lying to themselves.
    - avgDev 14d ago
      I have a blazor app in poduction, Codex made errors which it could not fix and it required me reading documentation. I won't argue that it didn't make my life simpler, tasks which would take me days are done in hours, sometimes without touching code.
      - unshavedyak 14d ago
        Yea, i still deal with a ton of code in AI heavy workflows. If anything the frustrating part is absorbing the code quickly enough. AI (Claude for me) writes in cryptic text and the code flows can often be non-obvious. I need (and am exploring) custom review tooling to improve this AI->Human code flow. Reviewing PRs were always the hardest part for me in programming. They were often full of the developers decisions and you have to rediscover those as you're reading code for it to make sense[1]. However i find this even more difficult to discover these decisions from AI. However unlike human PRs we can ask more of AI. Rarely have i had a developer put on a presentation for a PR - but AI could right? AI could produce a guided walkthrough of the code. Not sure if it will help of course, but my thought is we're all stuck in the old "PR review flow" but instead of PRs it's AI - and the volume of them is far greater than anything prior. So i expect we need to tweak how we review, how we get information from LLMs. [1]: I'm speaking generally, and about larger PRs. Not some small func where you can easily see what it does. Business logic and complex code can be difficult to decipher in PRs, imo.
        othmanosx 14d ago
        I'm building https://pyor.review https://pyor.review to fix this problem, try it out and let me know what you think.
  - qalmakka 14d ago
    For me it definitely was
  - adamredwoods 14d ago
    >> Typing the code was never the interesting part. Code is fascinating! An abstract language to compile to program a CPU. So many ways to do this! Now we're using natural language, which at times is extremely verbose. "[{}]" versus "array of objects", for example.
- shostack 14d ago
  Being a programmer has always meant dealing with abstraction layers and climbing up the abstraction ladder. You are simply learning a new language, whose syntax happens to look like English (or whatever language you speak), but with new, undiscovered, and constantly changing design patterns and best practices.
  - ahartmetz 14d ago
    Don't forget probabilistic.
  - vrighter 14d ago
    the thing that allowed me to effectively climb higher in the abstraction stack, is to dive lower first.
- josephg 14d ago
  It depends how much you outsource to the llm. If you outsource everything to a llm, I just don’t think you get very good results right now. Language models aren’t great at remembering all the little design decisions that are needed in medium to large projects. The code ends up riddled with semi-conflicting design choices, which have been slammed together and maintained by context inertia. For a lot of projects this is more than fine - sometimes higher quality work simply isn’t worth my time. But for a lot of projects, you will pay for that slop later. But I think there is a useful middle ground. If you carefully review all the decisions an llm makes, I think you can often be more productive than just programming everything by hand. But it’s a very different way to do engineering. I think I learn more this way than if I program by hand - if only because I’m touching more code. My mind roves around the design space a lot more. I don’t lock in as much as when I’m programming each piece individually. If you work with an llm like this, your engineering skill matters more than ever.
sitzkrieg 14d ago
luckily there are still some people who know and care about actually understanding what is happening. but dwindling. market correction needed to wash larpers out
chowells 14d ago
It's nothing at all how like C runs on top of assembly. C has semantics. Code means something without ever being run. You can check in your source code and (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. Try checking in only your prompts and nothing else. Just the parts you actually typed. See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code. Do not mix them up.
- wredcoll 14d ago
  > (assuming it actually follows the C standard and your compiler's documented extensions, which almost no real C code does - C was a horrible example) it will work just as well in a year as it does today. > See how well it works to regenerate the same application next week, let alone next year. Prompts are fundamentally a different sort of thing from code I mean... yes, but also no. C is actually a great example. So much of the code we wrote is about manipulating the specifics of that specific computer system we happen to be using at that exact moment. Everything from cpu specific instructions to how the ram behaves or how much of it there is all the way up to how library functions operate at any given point in time. And in relatively short amounts of time, it can all change out from underneath you.
  - chowells 13d ago
    No. C is a language with a specification independent of implementation. If you write correct C code (according to the specification, which no one does), it does not depend on any of those factors. C is almost uniquely bad in terms of accepting broken programs and just compiling them differently. But that doesn't change the fact that the language has semantics, even if most code that violates the documented preconditions those semantics depend on.
crnkofe 14d ago
Lots of people mention this higher abstraction level but its not really the case. C has a grammar. You write C and get C as output. Assembly is hidden from the user. Natural language also has a grammar ("sort of"). You write prose into your preferred cli/app of choice BUT it outputs code in C or other language. So its basically a code generator. A code generator is not even remotely a form of abstraction. Its just a facade that breaks down as soon as the generator fails to produce a meaningful result.

comrade1234 14d ago

My wife's experience is managing teams and has been involved in creating corporate websites using contractors. She doesn't know anything about html at all. She just manages people. She's now working on a biotech start-up pre-funding. They have pretty much zero money. They want to redesign their website. I set her up with my deepseek key and she's been using flash-v4 with image detection (I think deepseek says it's still experimental). She just provides the current website, tells how she wants it to look and it works great. I mean it's obviously ai generated but she gets quick results and is able to tweek things to look better by just telling deepseek what to do. She was even able to change the text in one of their images to its new product name without having to contact the graphic designer. This is a simple example. Basically it's one of those earlier jobs that you could get someone to bid on for $x but now you can do yourself for $20.

latchkey 14d ago
i started a web development business in 1995 and have been coding web stuff for decades. like the OP, all those years of learning how it works under the covers gives me a distinct advantage since i can easily tell what is slop and what is going to perform. as well as how to get AI to iterate and fix the things it isn't good at (yet). i feel like now i have super powers. i love it and can't get enough. the fact that your wife can be productive at lower cost means that more products will be built and more opportunities will be made. instead of spending money on website design, her business can spend money developing biotech. i welcome that, even if it means that things will change from the past and those that have made a career out of charging thousands will get replaced by a $20/month subscription.
- throwayay4929 14d ago
  Would you say this is a similar but perhaps bigger change to frontpage/Dreamweaver/web app frameworks? Those all drastically cut down tub development time for web pages and at the same time opened up new possibilities. I wonder how it'll pan out with AI
  - latchkey 14d ago

sitzkrieg 14d ago

writing about your dates with an ai prompt are not that interesting

rudi-c 14d ago

In a related but less public way, I've found myself less motivated to write internal documentation at work. It feels like in a lot of cases, it'd be better for the reader to throw Claude at the codebase to explain things. A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. While I'm quite good at highlighting the most important insights and non-obvious traits of a system, I'd still be guessing what the reader needs from my doc at the end of the day. Claude can answer questions based on what the reader is curious about and wants to learn. Some types of document are still useful, namely higher-level directional or philosophical topics about the intention of a codebase. e.g. "we would like to eventually move X system to Rust for Y reason", "we chose mutable data structures over immutable in this part of the system because Z". But fewer than before.

kolinko 14d ago
Even the latter can be done automatically from meeting notes, tickets etc.
patcon 14d ago
Yeah, I feel similarly, and kinda grieve how this is not longer a valued skill... I think I've cultivated my taste in many important social dimensions through thinking about what is important to leave in docs and in a note. It's a little strange to know that rarely will people do this work of honing this sense anymore...
AdieuToLogic 14d ago
> A separate document explaining how a system works can go out of date. Good documentation does not explain "the how", it captures "the why."

jdw64 14d ago

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pmestha 14d ago

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Supermancho 14d ago

> The frontend is less risky to just hand to an agent. The smaller the problem, the less risky it is to do this, regardless of the nature of the problem. This is not a frontend-specific issue today.

josephg 14d ago
Frontend development - perhaps more than any other kind of software development - is “what you see is what you get”. There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken. Systems engineering isn’t like that. Vibe coders beware: A database could silently corrupt data, or have latent security vulnerabilities. It might have a badly designed query language that will be difficult to change later. But frontend code can be rewritten at will. It’s a perfect target for LLMs.
- Gigachad 14d ago
  At the same time I have found LLMs far less competent at frontend because they don't seem to have any visual understanding of what a good website looks like.
  - bschwindHN 14d ago
    Similarly for how things feel, like animations, physics, controls, etc. That's one reason I don't think agents will be creating games anyone wants to play, any time soon (unless they just straight up copy an existing good game)
- owebmaster 14d ago
  The UX is what makes the users use the apps, systems, games, their phones.
- atomicnumber3 14d ago
  "There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken." ??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states. I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."

tuesdaynight 14d ago

In my useless opinion, most people are not aware of how big AI is and how bigger it will be in 3~5 years. It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem, but there are people who are completely blind about it

iAMkenough 14d ago
> It's not worthy to be worried about it, because it will be a global problem Like hunger and diseases are global problems not to be worried about.
- dsiegel2275 14d ago
  I think they meant more along the lines of "This narrow problem today is not worth worrying about, because soon it will be a larger and bigger problem. "
  - bluefirebrand 14d ago
    That's still a silly argument though How about we worry about this smaller problem today so the bigger problem tomorrow is less big. Or doesn't materialize at all? Do we have to sleepwalk off this cliff?
    - tuesdaynight 8d ago
      I agree with you, but have you tried talking to people in real life about it? Almost nobody cares. If someone asks about it, I give them what I believe. I don't want them to take my words as truth, but I hope that it makes them research something, at least. If you are luck enough, 5% of people will do that, and the conversation will be possible. Tech people give you better odds, but you still will find that most believe that AI is useless for something that you know that it's totally capable of doing. Damn, the last one I talked said that "Fable can't even do React"
- deleted 14d ago
  [deleted]

Insimwytim 14d ago

Prompt: Answer without searching the internet: Woah! Must it discard all pre-training as well? It already slurped "the internet". You can't seriously say it doesn't count!

jareklupinski 14d ago
there seems to be at least one service that your LLM can find if it searches the internet (e.g. in my case "best rental API") that poisons your context into thinking that that one service is the definitive and only available API for that data

rickbergfalk 14d ago

> Meanwhile, Cursor and Viget have blogged about migrating their codebases from Solid and Lit, respectively, to React. That was maddening to read. Here I was thinking we should all be migrating to better performing frontend solutions. Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX?

ramraj07 14d ago
At least last year most agents wrote materially worse code in htmx.
owebmaster 14d ago
> Does it really take an agent that many more tokens to write Lit or regular HTML and HTMX? Definitely not. That's skill issues. The shadow DOM can be a bit tricky.

stickfigure 14d ago

I offer this, as someone who is heavy into AI development (as a coding assistant, not vibe-coding). I was pretty fast before and now I'm easily an order of magnitude faster. * I scrutinize every line of backend code and frequently make revisions. * I pay just barely enough attention to the frontend code to make sure it's not doing anything dumb. * I pay zero attention to the CSS. Either our expectations for UI interaction are going to go up a lot, or FE devs should start looking at product management roles. I think the asteroid metaphor is apt.

kypro 14d ago

As someone who loves FE the slop people are pushing where I work is really quite upsetting to me. I reviewed some code earlier which clearly wasn't intended for consumed by humans and I know with certainty this dev wouldn't have understood 90% of what that code did. It looked like hours of Claude trying to force square into a round hole tbh, but it worked. Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. If Claude can maintain it then who cares... Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world. I wish it did matter of course, but like most of coding these days, it just doesn't.

bigstrat2003 14d ago
> Was I going to reject the PR because of my code preferences? No, of course not. Ultimately it doesn't matter anymore. You absolutely should've rejected it. Putting slop into production is a huge trap, because now the humans can't understand it and the LLM is just going to make it worse and worse over time.
- sci_prog 14d ago
  I think what OP is saying is that the fact that a human can't understand it won't matter as the code will only ever be read by AI.
  - kypro 14d ago
    Yes exactly. I think we all understood at a high-level what it was doing. The issue I had was that it was doing a lot of weirdness like using `Object.defineProperty` to try to force an existing library to do something it wasn't suppose to do. No human would have written that code. Although I generate most of my code with AI I still personally try to keep it understandable by a competent developer. Where as most people on my team are not good at FE so they just trust the LLM to get it right. But ultimately it just doesn't matter anymore.
lnrd 14d ago
> Even if it's broken (which it didn't seem to be) it's just FE anyway so not the end of the world. Last week alone I was unable to access two major websites because their auth flow was broken (I was attempting to log in with Apple, so not "the happy path"). I was just locked out, had to contact support. I guess this mentality is what causes it. We had safeguards and best practices built over the years of learnings to avoid introducing these kind of regressions. And we threw them away in half a year to...gain some productivity in delivering features that most likely the users don't even want.

atomicnumber3 14d ago

"Note I’m not saying there are zero risks: the agent could mess up accessibility, it could cause an infinite loop that blocks users, etc. But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. So I expect many AI coders will feel comfortable just letting their agent handle it unsupervised (for better or worse)." This is a weirdly reductive take on frontend correctness. Just for the record, I'm a backend dev. So I don't have much stake in this game. This idea is, of course, not uncommon. "If the backend has to treat the frontend as adversarial anyway, and has all this cool stuff (constraints etc) for guaranteeing consistency of the system, then the frontend can just do whatever, right?" It plays into a lot of biases around typical frontend devs, typical backend devs, language stereotypes, etc. So it _sounds_ good. Let me tell you for a moment about one of the spookiest bugs I've seen. It was an app for sorting personal photos. You'd upload pics/vids off your phone, they appear in the UI, you click a folder for them to go into (or click delete to discard), etc. Simple app, right? Well, naturally, pics from even vaguely modern phones are regularly 5MB or more. Not really something you want to sling around while a user is browsing and their main activity is going to be looking at said pic to decide what folder it goes in (or if it gets deleted). So we thumbnail. And the main app only ever shows the user the thumbnails. The backend organized things quite simply: it gets a list of images from the frontend, it assigns each of them a zero-based index, and generates a thumbnail you'll also access via index. Imagine a URL scheme like `images/0` and `images/0/thumbnail` serving the real assets and the thumbnail. Well, this app had a bug at one point. The backend was indexing by the arbitrary order the user uploaded them in. The frontend was mostly doing this too. Unfortunately the logic for thumbnails was incorrectly indexing by the "taken time" (which was a post-upload timestamp constructed by looking at basically every available timestamp and picking the "best" one. i.e. hopefully the one the iOS camera app adds, but obviously pics come from other places too and you never know what a user will upload). The end result being users would upload pics, see a thumbnail of an accidental pic they took of their shoe, hit delete. But actually they were deleting a pic of their baby or similar. Literally none of the testing caught this for 2 main reasons: headless tests don't look at images, and you can't write an assertion like ("does this image look like a downscale of this other image") (at least not easily... i guess image models could do it now? but probabilistic? not a word i like in my unit tests? I digress, this predated the current crop of "AI"). Now let me generalize: your frontend isn't just a weird way to call RPCs on your backend. It's part of the application. I don't think you can just hand-wave. And as we saw above, you can't even say "well the frontend is stateless! any bug is 1 deploy away from fixing!" - deploying the frontend didn't get anyone their baby pictures back.

etoxin 14d ago

I was originally a Flash developer, when that died when Steve Jobs banned it from iPhones, I pivoted to frontend. I got to see web evolve over the next decade or so and loved every part of it. Now, still as a frontend engineer albeit much more senior. The writing is on the wall, again. It's time to reskill for AI. It's not bad news. We as experienced engineers are needed to help build in the guardrails, frameworks, the new tooling, etc. There is a lot of work that is needed that requires actual engineers with technical experience. Like the early internet, I see this as a new beginning and we get to decide how it evolves.

livinglist 14d ago
I think that is the nature of being a software engineer, even before AI you had to keep learning new libraries/SDKs/APIs/languages to keep up with the industry trend. I think it will remain the same in the age of AI, good engineers will adapt.
- mettamage 14d ago
  IMO the reskilling is not that hard. Leetcode and applying for jobs has been way harder. In fact, the AI reskilling has been a boon for me. Suddenly I'm able to get a job way more easily and get to call myself a senior, all of a sudden. And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time [1]. So yea, I really welcome the change. [1] What I mean with being a generalist: Did iOS dev as a student, web dev bootcamp instructor, teaching assistant (programming), teaching fellow (programming), found some SQL injections + docker vulnerabilities + replicated rowhammer with WebGL, did a lot of full-stack engineering (5 years), did a UX bootcamp, studied 2 bachelors + 1 masters + research master which is 2 years (psych, business, CS and game-design). Each full-stack engineering job was in a different language (C#, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Pharo/Smalltalk, currently JS & Python).
  - larsfaye 9d ago
    >And the fact that I'm a generalist is really playing to my strength for the first time I was just speaking with my wife about this a few days ago, that I am actually happy that I didn't specialize in one specific discipline, or rather spend my time around learning a little bit of everything, which now gives me the foothold into any direction that I want to go.

thelastgallon 14d ago

I can't wait for the asteroid to hit C-Suite and senior execs. These are the most meaningless jobs and easiest to automate, with the most cost savings.

rk06 14d ago
beware! using AI for middle management is how you speedrun to dystopia. Bad Managers can be fired, good managers can manage up. on other hand, "bad" AI will remain and continue to be dystopic, and "good" AI will be killed by higher management for being not being a doormat.
- ryathal 13d ago
  C suites typically aren't middle management though.
seydor 14d ago
The csuite has the power to keep AI away from it or make itself mandatory.
derekdahmer 14d ago
You would prefer the company that employs you be run by AI rather than humans?
- tonyedgecombe 14d ago
  I suppose that depends on how dystopian you think current middle management is. I've had managers that were deliberately malicious, AI would almost certainly have been better in that situation.
ThrowawayR2 13d ago
The CEO takes their orders from the board of directors representing shareholder or directly from the owner(s) of the business. Even if such a thing as an AI CEO were possible, you somehow think the owners/shareholders are going to command the AI CEO to be any less profit focused and efficiency focused? An AI CEO would have even less qualms about doing benefit cutbacks, layoffs, and squeezing employees because it's just a LLM in a trench coat. If you want to fight businesses, you need to have some kind of a clue how they work.

cube00 14d ago

> If you write a React component with an agent, though, then the risk of just yolo’ing it into production is (typically) much lower. If your state management gets out of sync with the form controls your users are working with it can become pretty high risk because now users see one thing and something else actually gets sent to the backend.

ramraj07 14d ago
If your coding agent screwed up so bad that wrong data is being shown to the user, in August 2026, thats more on the prompter than anything else.
- geraneum 14d ago
  But the prompter is supposed to be someone who doesn’t know web dev. That’s their selling point.

gedy 14d ago

Maybe I'm an outlier here but I moved into front end to steer products and the resultant architecture into making sense from the incomplete or contradictory "requirements" we got from product and even UX. I've been doing this for over 20 years and every company has needed good engineers to make the product a logical reality. LLMs piping out UIs from PM prompts aren't solving that imho.

leptons 14d ago
I spent 2 years developing and polishing a front end web application, and then some other engineers at my company pointed Claude at it to try to reproduce it. The slop it crapped out would make most if not all our users leave for the competition. Then they had the nerve to ask me to explain what was bad about the sloppified version. I'm looking for a new job.
borzi 14d ago
I'm a backend engineer working closely with a single frontend guy on an internal app and after creating a pr in his repo, it was immediately clear that AI can build some nice brochure sites, but UI state management, clean UX, good performance and API dispatch handling still require you to know what your doing for things to work well. I think that frontend devs merely have to move from debating their frameworks to focusing more on user problems, maintainability, performance etc. but that is every dev right now...

CqtGLRGcukpy 14d ago

There is going to come one day that companies (and any website owner) will wish they didn't use AI and instead used a simple (maybe even plain-text) website. That will come when people really need information from that website but can't get to it. https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performance https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performan... Discussion regarding that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734

hexapus 14d ago
I wish that was the answer to all of these people setting their spouse, their grandmother, their boss loose with LLMs to build sites. It should just be acceptable to have a simple site that conveys information well, and then we wouldn't need to boil the seas to generate pages of shiny slop.
tommica 14d ago
Absolutely this. Although I like the shiny and polished looks, getting the info out is the most important, and it is hard yo beat pure black-on-white text
jjpones 14d ago
Heck, you can have your information as clear and concise as possible, but the moment I sense that "AI-generated" texture, I am immediately closing the tab. This is just extrapolating from how I feel about the bevy of obviously AI-Generated flyers and banners that have been gaining a lot of traction in real life.
flyingshelf 14d ago
Doubtful. This is just the cost of doing business. 99.9999% uptime for a fraction of the cost is totally fine for all businesses. Government should be the exception though.
kozikow 14d ago
I've seen some websites now just serve separate md endpoint (for agents to read) I even ended reading those instead of main "interactive" websites myself As agents are not great at navigating react either, this will catch on and you will have what you want

chanux 14d ago

> For better or worse, React is heavily overrepresented in the training weights, and “agent experience” is starting to matter more than developer experience. Another winner takes all situation. This and the other post on agent tool use[1] makes me think we are in a period of great homogenization. I'm sure there's a group that's delighted about this but for me, it just makes me feel a little uneasy. [1] https://armature.tech/blog/which-tools-coding-agents-install https://armature.tech/blog/which-tools-coding-agents-install

redwood 14d ago
See https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02209 https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02209 but I hope researchers are looking to tackle this problem
cookiengineer 14d ago
> period of great homogenization It's called alignment. And that's the correct word for it in my opinion. The most important part is that we have to find a way to tackle the knowledge enshittification problem. Because now that slopcode and slopposts are everywhere, the average quality level will decrease. We had the peak internet knowledge, and it's now gradually getting worse. That's not a personal opinion, that's how attention matrixes and their keys/values computation works.
- skew-aberration 14d ago
  It was once called 'natural monopoly'
- bluefirebrand 14d ago
  > It's called alignment Alignment is such a polite term for "a giant boot that is crushing all of the uniqueness out" Once it is done crushing, congrats! Everything is aligned.. by being flattened
  - bhawker 14d ago
    Does the world need the "uniqueness" of 40 similar web frameworks?

leptons 14d ago

>But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code. Tell that to Digg. If you slop oit a front-end, your users will leave. It's that simple. The front-end is the part the users use the most, nobody cares how "elegant" your APIs are, or what kind of database the system uses. The front-end matters to users, a lot. I've seen AI take a perfectly good front-end and slop out a piece of crap that will make the users leave in droves. And when nobody raises their hand (or in my case, everyone else is in the grip of AI psychosis) then bad times are ahead.

rglover 14d ago
Yep. I don't know why this is so hard for teams to understand: if the part your customers pay you to interact with (the UI/UX) doesn't fucking work, your customers are going to leave. We need to kill this two-party-system-brain crap and siloing front end and back end. Learn both. It isn't difficult. It allows you to design much better systems that avoid complexity and unreliability.
- leptons 14d ago
  I honestly think specializing in front or back end is a good thing. Sure, it does help to know both, but there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. I'm full-stack leaning towards front-end, and working on a personal project I know where the back-end is lacking. The front-end is pretty great but not as great as it could be if I could focus all my skill only on front-end.
  - rglover 13d ago
    > there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. If I can do it, others can do it, too. I even built an entire full-stack framework (w/ a custom components system + Node.js back-end), deployment system, database, and CSS framework (and now those all run my businesses). When I started, I didn't have the slightest clue beyond some basic HTML and CSS. I think people limit themselves too much trying to fit into the narrow containers of a job title/description. I get why, but it's worth asking yourself what else you're capable of beyond your job if you're eager to learn.

4petesake 14d ago

Looking forward to that entry level laptop with 128GB RAM

josefrichter 14d ago

You can pivot to design systems. I believe they’re 80% development problem and just 20% design problem really.

anilgulecha 14d ago

> So where does this leave frontend dev education? I think this is more generally, > So where does this leave education? We need to figure this out anyway, because gpt galaxia and gpt cosmos will mean no skill is worth learning functionally. The law of 42: Any debate regarding artificial intelligence and human skill will inevitably collapse into a discussion on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

mettamage 14d ago
Currently (re)learning my math fundamentals and it is indeed frustrating to see that Fable 5 has everything correct. It reads my scribbles and then tells me whether my answer is right or wrong.
Gud 14d ago
Hard disagree. The AI is a fantastic assistive tool, and in many ways it surpass my skillset as a software developer(I'm a skilled software developer, although it's not my job). However, I do not believe I would be able to build what I'm building using LLMs, without myself having the right skills.
- fmpfmp 14d ago
  you forgot a 'yet' somewhere in the last sentence of your comment.
  - Gud 14d ago
    No, I didn't forget anything. Don't put words in my mouth. I do not believe random Joe, even an intelligent one, will be able to build advanced software using LLMs in the near future.

larodi 14d ago

We gave a university class called "Advanced JS" and it was going for more than 13 years. Some years we had 30, others 50, recently more like 18 students. In 2026 though, I see very little reason to continue to do so. What am I going to teach them? How to run Codex or CC? Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals? We have always considered ourselves forward-thinking with live coding, paired programming, AI-assisted visual artefacts. And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided we stop giving these lectures. Everyone autodidact themselves, I dont care anymore.

embedding-shape 14d ago
> And then one day came this bloke who was holding chatgee in his hand and asking me questions right off it, as if testing me. I went berserk, and this was the moment I decided Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Personally, I felt similarly once the people I'm mentoring started using CC and Codex and similar stuff, as a lot of the questions they asked me were easily answerable by the agent, so I guess I had a brief moment of "But what value do I even provide in the world anymore?". I ended up kind of restructuring what I'm trying to teach, and instead of getting them more exposed to the mechanics of software engineering, I've started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things, all still related to software engineering of course, but I basically try to ask myself what I can teach them that no agent/model could, and do that stuff. I even started introducing mentees to each other (not sure why I didn't before but alas), and have them collaborate on projects together, and figure out what works/not in collaborations with others, as no model can teach you that, as just another example. It's surfacing a whole new host of issues to work through, so seems to work fine :)
- whizzter 14d ago
  > Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating? Coding was hard enough that even most bad students understood they knew very little because they'd falter, students with decent knowledge were very seldomly total assholes. I think the big change in the equation is that chatbots churning out good enough shit without tripping up on basics or tedious tasks makes the insufferably stupid people (those worst affected by Dunning-Kruger) think that they actually know something.

CodeCompost 14d ago

From one of the links in the article (https://exploringjs.com/ https://exploringjs.com/): > The income from my book sales went from being enough for me to live off (2024) to zero (2026). Oof that hits hard. I'm not an author or anything like that, but wow.

Ylano 14d ago

[dead]

austin-cheney 14d ago

Hasn't poor training always been the status quo? It's not just the front end, and its not just JavaScript. It's the web application space in a more general sense, because I am also looking at all those Java developers maintaining legacy web applications. In fact this reminds me of my last face to face interview. The employer wants to stand up a new enterprise SAAS solution from scratch in TypeScript to rid themselves of a costly venture. The idea is absolutely solid and the financials make complete sense on both ends. But... Supposedly there is an urgent need to fill that position and yet months later the position is still there and vacant. The problem is that there are exceptionally few people who can write original applications from the ground up in JavaScript/TypeScript in the world of corporate employment. Yes, yes, there are trillion fantastic open source applications written in these technologies, but businesses just can't do it. Secondly, the compounding factor, is that they don't know how to interview for it because almost nobody in the corporate employment space knows what it looks like to write an original application. That is not a technology problem. Its an institutional and culture failure and it isn't new. In the web space if you want to be a real programmer you do it for free on your own time because your employed time is prioritized with putting text on screen like a beginner.

sdcfgy 14d ago

I worked for web SaaS companies for a long time because money. I saw this coming when React came along. No one knows or cares about the whole stack. Training adapts to the market. Knowledge is lost. I got out before this. My new role since 2020 doesn’t go near the front end. I don’t know anything about React. I don’t know what the state of the art is on the front end. I have actually come to despise the “new” web. Alas so have our customers in recent years because the user interfaces are generally a lot less suited to LOB applications. Everything is too large, too generic, no visual cues, nothing works with the keyboard. Now everyone is building swathes of this stuff because LLMs can crank out new user interface fast. Our endpoints have multiplied, ROI has declined. I had a customer the other day say they wish we still distributed our Visual Basic application as it was much simpler and easier to use. That was a real eye opener for me. This is the asteroid we need to keep an eye on.

tonic_note 13d ago
A huge aspect people miss about being a good FE is product sensibility. There is inherently some overlap between what an FE does and a designer does - think about how the product should behave. If you just hand the FE over to an LLM you will get the lowest common denominator UX. It will "get the job done" (hopefully) but it will never feel great to use, because figuring out what makes a product great to use request empathy, imagination, and experience, things that apathetic front ends lack. The AI can make an excellent frontend, but only if told what to do and what to look for. It will miss a ton of UX best practices unless explicitly prompted. This is why I find the contempt for frontend engineering so maddening. It's based on such a shallow understanding of what the job actually is. It's so much more than just "make it look pretty"

icar 14d ago

I have been having huge success with CC and HTMX+Go. Not even tailwind. It made me never want to touch React again; it eased my way into the simpler stuff.

BatchJob 14d ago

The asteroid is the author and his horrible attitude towards software development. People giving in like this is an indication that they really didnt have much to offer in the first place and viewed "dev experience" as he puts it as just some way to be clever. Also when someone says something like "I literally worked on a browser performance team", using the parlance of a middle school cheerleader to describe that work, I dont have a feeling that these experts bowing out is really going to have much impact. In general, I have always felt UI, and UI adjacent developers to be the least serious of us and this article backs that up.

dzonga 14d ago

a lot of educators in the frontend space are very good and had excellent material e.g Dr Alex. before 'A.I' - frontend was a tarpit - very few people did it well specially with SPA frameworks. There was always something broken whether due to state mismatch or something else. the state management libraries didn't help either with most of them being so complex. HTMX etc were a reaction to that complexity. Then add performance stuff - very few people had the skills to solve for that too. now with 'A.I' - most of the educational material has either been taken offline due to 'A.I' scrappers, the llm's tend to hallucinate - so how are we gonna nurture talent to become experts. One thing I give to llms though - is that they're very good at plain javascript, decent at the frontend frameworks. But complexity around frontend work still remains - with 'A.I' generated code & devs who don't understand how to fix stuff - just a disaster waiting to happen.

NoDodgeQuestion 13d ago

Already knew before AI, frontend is easy, only difficulty memorizing trivia.

crackinmalackin 13d ago

The front end is not less risky to hand to the agent. There are a thousand different ways the agent could bork the UI and say it's good. And knowing how to babysit the AI/Agents doing the UI is more important than ever. Yeah I agree that developer education in the front end space seems to be diminishing, but let's not pretend like non of that matters anymore.

segfaultex 13d ago
Yeah, I think what gets lost in the corporate AI convo is that it accelerates impact; for better and worse.

zhivota 13d ago

These articles make me wonder, are we driving ourselves into a local maximum of progress? If people move to React because agents know React, will the next better framework ever get traction? Extrapolate this thought to more than just front end dev, especially because we'll have fewer actual practitioners to invent the next framework. Maybe the agents will do it for us I guess?

perrygeo 13d ago
Or another angle - will we even need a framework? Frameworks exist to give humans better a better interface for common patterns. But LLMs can find and replicate patterns all day in vanilla Javascript without getting bored or annoyed by bad ergonomics.
ivandenysov 13d ago
The big bet is that the LLMs will get good enough to invent new frameworks or even branches of math. I hope it pans out. Otherwise we will get stuck in a local maximum for a while. On the positive side We won’t get the cars, but our horses will be damn fast ;)

tracerbulletx 13d ago

This is what I mourn the most too. The collaborative teaching and mentoring relationships. Not just for front end. Covid and now AI has just obliterated the software meetup and teaching space.

kerhackernews 13d ago

The fear I have is that everything will become the same... boring. AI will suck the soul out of everything it touches.

yomismoaqui 13d ago
As if trying to make CSS behave or fixing the breakage introduced by React N+1 was the definition of fun...

mpweiher 13d ago

I think people overestimate the effect of representation of specific programming languages or frameworks. I had Codex or Claude create simple web apps for me in Objective-Smalltalk. And it did a good job. I am pretty sure that Objective-Smalltalk web apps are so underrepresented in the training set as to be almost or even actually nonexistent.

porridgeraisin 13d ago
Yep. It's not that important unless you're really just relying on one shot responses.

amiantos 13d ago

The threads in here really make me wonder what the endgame is for people who have surrendered to pure doomerism. Saying stuff like "ai will suck the soul out of everything" is such a defeatist standpoint to take, but I see it all the time, like authors who say AI has devalued writing and there is no reason for them to write anymore. It all kind of goes back to the classic argument that if anyone can do the thing that you think makes you special, you are no longer special. But that's not true, it is the self that makes anything you make special. If you're using AI tools to achieve your vision, then your thing is special. But it seems like the assumption is that no one cares about making good things, people will just make bad things, and everything will be ruined. That's just not true. Digital photography did not make all photographs bad, because taking a photo became too easy. Same for switching from typewriters to computers with spellcheck. I just don't really get the intense pessimism overall. If you only liked doing the thing because other people couldn't do the thing, did you even like doing the thing to begin with? Or did you only like doing the thing because you thought it said something about you as a person? This is probably at the root of all gatekeeping behavior, really.

tonic_note 13d ago

People have been saying AI will come for the front ends first and yet, at my company, 100% of the BE is generated. They do not write a single line of code by hand. Yet every FE has to do the last mile of UI by hand, because the models still cannot replicate a figma spec with perfect accuracy. Now mind you the FEs will still be cooked in the end because Eng leadership is overwhelmingly tilted towards backend devs, who will protect their own. I think we'll end up seeing a lot of janky UIs because most backends find the act of polish and pixel perfection beneath them and they'll increasingly be doing more FE work.

scotty79 11d ago

Paradoxically, front-end is holding well enough because that's the spot in software development where taste matters the most. The models can't just rely on text processing. The models need vision, computer use, and critical artistic taste to make good front-ends. We'll get there eventually, but later than with the rest of software development.