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- Hacker News
- > 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.
by Supermancho - When done properly, yes. But AI agents are doing a lot of data logic in the frontend that should be in the backend behind secure api's. When this happens, the frontend becomes a massive risk.by etoxin
- 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.
by josephg - 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?
by zhivota - 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 ;)
by ivandenysov - 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.by perrygeo
- 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.
by gedy - 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.by leptons
- 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...
by borzi - 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.
by tonic_note - > 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.
by anilgulecha - 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.
by Gud - 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.by mettamage
- From one of the links in the article (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.
by CodeCompost - > 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?
by rickbergfalk - > 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.
by owebmaster - At least last year most agents wrote materially worse code in htmx.by ramraj07
- 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.
- 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.
by ThrowawayR2 - You would prefer the company that employs you be run by AI rather than humans?by derekdahmer
- The csuite has the power to keep AI away from it or make itself mandatory.by seydor
- 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.by rk06
- 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.
by etoxin - 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.by livinglist
- 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.
by larodi - I would pay for such content. Do you have course notes? Have you written a book? I'd pay to get expert knowledge from... an expert! LLMs are fine, but still not replacing actual human experts IME.by belmarca
- The issue is that AI is still very bad at making frontends that work well on any kind of device, for blind people or otherwise impaired, color blind, ...
However it's not that anyone cared before otherwise AI would know better than that
by herbst - Unless this is the endpoint of software engineering (React for the next thousand years?) someone’s gonna have to do the work of understanding and pushing things forward. It won’t be an agent.by archagon
- >Who in his right mind would like to dive in super complex browser internals?
I would have loved this in college. I know most don't, but I think we'll hit a point where the people who don't know enough to assess when model output is sub-par will fall by the wayside.
I'm not arrogant enough to think that I won't be included in this blast radius, so I try to dig as deeply as I can whenever possible (and where it makes sense,IE: I couldn't tell you all of the details of LLVM or hypervisor internals)
by segfaultex - > 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 :)