Comment by Supermancho
9 hours 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.
9 hours 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.
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.
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.
> There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken
Any website that has any UI state management or does any kind of network calls can be invisibly broken in many, many ways
The UX is what makes the users use the apps, systems, games, their phones.
"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."
React state bugs are usually not invisible failure modes.
Other kinds of software - for example, the backend of a website - have far more invisible failure modes. Security. Correctness. Performance. Bad API design leading to overfetching. Etc. Software works great on your machine and when you demo it, but it falls apart at scale. Endpoints that aren't secured properly. Race conditions cause silent data corruption. Memory leaks. And so on.
If claude messes up writing a react frontend, we're more likely to find the problem quickly. And frontend bugs usually don't continue to cause problems after they've been fixed. Silent bugs in the backend are more dangerous and more expensive.
No need to engage with bad faith premises. You cant convince someone who is invested in their own FUD.
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.