I recently put out a video arguing that frontend development is changing. I don't think the work is going away. The frontend developer title is what's changing, and a lot of us are turning into full stack developers.
The comments had opinions, so I recorded a follow-up.
Pick a stack and get really good at it
One comment that I found really interesting was from a 62 year old developer with almost 30 years in the field. In the comment he described how Claude handles about half his workload now. His advice was to pick a couple of good frontend frameworks like Vue or Angular, pair them with a solid backend like C#, and become an absolute master at them.
I agree with him, and this was something I've always said. It's always good to be at least a specialist in one category. I use Kiro as my agent harness for most of my apps now, and I still want deep knowledge of the stack underneath. That way I can really understand what's happening and help steer the agent when things go wrong. The agents are good. They aren't good enough that I'd stop checking their work.
Is frontend design the safer part of web dev?
This comment is where the title comes from. CRUD apps are the easy wins for LLMs, the argument goes, and attractive, non-generic UI with great UX is where they still struggle.
I sort of agree. With the older Anthropic models you could tell someone one-shotted a design at a glance. It had that very generic Tailwind template look. However, with every new model it's becoming harder and harder to tell. People who aren't looking at this stuff every day mostly think the designs look fine.
I didn't talk much about taste in my last video, but it is important. Looking at a screen and knowing whether the UX works, catching an accessibility problem, noticing that a flow is going to bog users down. That judgment still comes from people with experience. Still, LLMs are getting closer all the time.
I rebuilt Winamp with an AI agent
To test this I picked something with a lot of small UI pieces. I had Kiro Crew recreate the old Winamp MP3 player, and it came back as ErikAmp.
I was really impressed with everything it did with the UI. An equalizer with a row of sliders, a scrolling playlist, play, pause, stop, next and previous, shuffle, repeat, balance, volume. Getting every one of those working by hand would take me a couple of days, maybe less if I did nothing else. The agent basically one-shot it last Saturday. I had it fix a few bugs afterward, and it wrote a whole test suite along the way.
The source code is really simple. I never asked for Vue or React, so it skipped frameworks entirely. It's an index.html, some CSS, a handful of JavaScript files, and a bit of Python.
You could argue that this design was already made, but still. I had it create three brand new themes, and it looks great.
Where it starts to look like AI
The second app I showed is a 5K coach I built to get myself in shape for a race. It tells me what to do each day.
This is about as close as I get to the default Anthropic look. Dark cards, rounded corners, pill badges. It isn't flashy and I wouldn't call it amazing. For my own training plan it's fine, and it took a few minutes with my agent. Building it by hand would have eaten a lot more of my time.
So are we cooked?
I don't think so. Building a frontend is the easiest it has ever been, and I got two working apps out of an agent with very little effort. Deciding whether those apps are any good is still the developer's job, and that takes knowing your stack and having some taste.
I'm also figuring out what to cover next. Do you want more AI workflow content, or more classic Vue and fundamentals tutorials? Tell me in the comments, and tell me where you think frontend is headed.
Top comments (14)
I don't think so as well. Although it is easier to do front-end with AI, it's easy to miss some important aspects of what makes a good front-end. One is accessibility, optimization, etc.
If you prompt the front-end generally, you tend to miss these since it's not really there for you to see. You have to make sure you test the front-end design to see if it's accessible, which can vary depending on who your audience is. You also have to take care of optimization, which is difficult since it depends on browser and one's computer specs.
Even when done with detail prompts, it's a similar experience since you are focus on the looks and not about if it's a good design in general.
Overall, AI makes it easier to create front-end designs, but it's important to catch as many edge cases as you can which is part of the human aspect. Sure, AI can take care of those edge cases, but you never know until you try it yourself.
Great writeup Erik!!
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Hi, interesting and maybe quite controversial topic.
I want to say, i hope we are not cooked! yet the way we develop is certainly changing. I liked the comments you mentioned above.
AI makes things easier, and can certainly extend one's skills-set a lot. But i love them best for i can learn much faster and quicker.
My thought is very much inline with the intent of your post (with a few exceptions on some specifics) 🥰
There are so many things I have to say on this topic, that I often just don't say much 🤣
This is my prediction: AI has the potential to replace all knowledge base workers, with the only exception of really good Software Engineers and Programming Ninjas (I'm separating SWE and Programmers for very good reasons too).
Of course, the exception part is exaggerated to prove a point. But in reality, I too think that AI will NOT replace anyone with deep foundational human knowledge. So, becoming very good at a few things, and having decent amount of knowledge on many other things will be extremely beneficial.
I have a post in my draft that somewhat explains why I think that.
I'll add the link to that post once I publish it.
We need more of these sort of posts to prevent AI CEOs misguiding new generations for their own financial gains. While AI is useful, it can never be replacement for human knowledge and creativity. It can only augment human capabilities.
BTW, before I complete that post, here's a short one: 😁
We Don't Need to Learn or Use Basic Math / Arithmetic Anymore 😜
Great read! I think frontend development is changing, but not disappearing. AI can generate components and layouts surprisingly well, yet translating business requirements into a reliable, accessible, and maintainable product still requires human judgment.
In my experience with open-source projects, the hardest part is rarely writing the initial code. It's understanding trade-offs, edge cases, and long-term maintenance. AI helps with implementation, but ownership and decision-making remain human responsibilities.
I've been shipping frontend with AI agents for about 18 months and the "generic Tailwind look" gap is closing faster than people think. Last month I had a designer friend review two landing pages — one I hand-coded, one Claude generated — and he picked the AI one as more polished. Taste still matters but it's becoming a steering skill, not a pixel-pushing skill. The real moat isn't design, it's knowing the stack well enough to debug when the agent confidently breaks something subtle.
The title change matches what I see. Vue on the front with Laravel behind it is what I write every day, and the work never cared which half I was in that week.
If AI takes anything first, I'd bet on the glue between the two halves: forms wired to endpoints, validation written twice. Deciding what the endpoint should do at all stays with us.
Frontend is the closest the user is to a working software. Frontend developers are what makes the design not only usable but "human-friendly". AI without context would be having a hard time in that scenario.
the 62 year old developer's framing is the part that holds. agents are good at CRUD, not at knowing when the task is wrong. someone who catches that is still in the loop because the model cannot fire itself.
the UI observation tracks for now. the generic Tailwind look has gotten harder to spot. but give it a layout that needs to respect an existing design system with real constraints and it gets conservative in the wrong direction.
what's the use case where a newer model actually solved a real design constraint, not just a visual one?
What did the generated test suite miss in ErikAmp that you caught through manual UI review?
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