The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

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.

> 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

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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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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_performan...

Discussion regarding that post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46494734

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.

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.

  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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

Looking forward to that entry level laptop with 128GB RAM

> 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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.