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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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 - 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.
- 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 - 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 - > 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
by chanux - 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.
by comrade1234