Comment by wuhhh
4 days ago
It really feels as though my 20 year career as a front end developer is coming to a very abrupt end; at least as I have know it these past two decades.
4 days ago
It really feels as though my 20 year career as a front end developer is coming to a very abrupt end; at least as I have know it these past two decades.
All software engineering is over as we know it. I haven't written a line of code since December 2025.
same tbh but i feel like we're still required, maybe not in the same numbers as before, and our job description has just changed. it feels more akin to an "AI Agent Operator" or something similar.
i'm still pretty confident someone like my mom wouldn't be able to do my job even with the same access to all the latest LLMs, so we're still providing some value, just in a very different way. whether the market will reprice the cost of our labor, we will see
If software development were getting easier, first thing I'd expect to see would be a strong downward trend in salaries. Why pay a high mid+ dev rate when a junior+LLM can do the same?
That's yet to happen. 90% of software dev skills are still relevant - AI is, for now, just a productivity boost.
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From my experience every (senior) developer with enough tokens always finds useful stuff to do. Some variation of Jevons paradox.
I'm envious you got to enjoy it for 20 years
I tried making a Things clone yesterday.
Spent maybe 7 hours of promoting with Fable.
I wanted to get drag and drop right, and I wanted good code architecture to start with.
It’s using TinyBase for data storage.
Here’s how far I got in 7 hours: https://focuslist.app
Yes, much faster than writing all of that by hand.
But prompting quality software into existence? No way. It would take at least another full time week to finish that app with all the detail I desire.
A week is fast, no? Would it be faster by hand?
50 hours of work seems like a tiny investment.
Yeah, but I was reacting to idea of "frontend developer career coming to an end".
I guess kinda - the job will change from "frontend developer" to "UI inventor"..
really? I have yet to see fable or 5.6 reliably generate front end code with correct a11y, for one thing -- does that not matter to the work you do?
It does matter, but how long do you think it takes to get right? It's a follow up prompt or a few tweaks by hand. I also have an /a11y skill for it that's tailored to exactly the things it sometimes doesn't get right first time round. Further, while it may not one-shot that stuff every time, with a little setup and the right AGENTS/CLAUDE md - it's usually not far off.
Another thing that helps is pointing it to patterns in an existing codebase (e.g. "use the box-link pattern for cards, as shown in [..]").
EDIT: The point being that even if they make mistakes that are easy to spot and fix _now_, you'd have to assume that in the very near future those kinks will be ironed out - I mean, the capabilities are only going in one direction.
In 20 years of my career I haven't seen humans generate correct a11y. When prompted and given quality reference (e.g. UK gov design system) LLMs can nowadays beat 19 out of 20 web devs.
Thanks out can also hook it to Playwright with Axe and let it run assessments.
I find this hard to believe. All I have to do is give it an example and tell it to go through and add it to the repo and it does it.
It does, when you explicitly ask you to do it. Hence the need for experienced devs running those models.