Historically, people used to build websites by writing custom code in HTML, CSS and Javascript. So, the UI of famous websites like Twitter, Youtube or Yahoo were dead simple. Believe me, they were at their best at their time.
But things evolved with time, and there came time of frameworks such as Bootstrap and TailwindCSS, which tools saved significant time in development with advanced design techniques. For example, Flexbox and Grid are relatively new topics in CSS, which were introduced later.
Things didn't stop there as more complex websites needed Dynamic interfaces and building with these frameworks. Advanced frontend frameworks like React, Angular and Vue came along and completely changed the development with components based design. These types of frameworks updated with a advanced State Management, such as like in Facebook updates dynamically after clicking. Things became more handy with more and more frameworks and tools such as NextJS, and various UI frameworks.
Enter the AI era, where OpenAI developed Codex, a tool to help developers write code faster. About half of code in Github is written by applying such tools. Then comes ChatGPT, which made it accessible for general public to use advanced AI tools to write simple code. Now, non-programmers can build a simple website or even a web app with the help of ChatGPT by using Prompt Engineering techniques.
Enabling the use of AI, tools like 10web and typedream let you make websites under a minute. These are mostly static sites and common web apps like blog or job board. Many other no code & design based tools are available in Market today to foster the dev time. However, one tool that caught my attention is v0 by Vercel, which was showcased to public yesterday. The tool is in Private alpha, but it seems to bring a revolution in Frontend Development as it designs everything with a prompt(such as design a home page for personal portfolio). We can iterate the process until it gives the required design for us, so that we can copy and paste to our code.
So, with the advancement of AI, I am sure there are more tools coming in the coming years. I even believe, no code/low code web development is going to be most common method by 2025, even for the very complex web applications.
This brings up to the question, Is it worth learning to code(especially Frontend in 2023)?
Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Top comments (2)
Good article!
Is it worth learning to code, especially frontend development, in 2023? Yes.
Programming involves taking a problem that a user, client, or customer has and solving it. These individuals often provide incomplete instructions, expect you to ask questions, and rely on you to navigate the gray areas. If you believe that business professionals and customers will spend hours instructing AI, then I respectfully disagree.
AI-generated code may not always be of high quality. I encountered issues while using Chat GPT this morning to assist me in building a custom web component. It made so many errors that I eventually gave up and resorted to reading an entire blog article for guidance.
AI may never fully comprehend what it's doing; it essentially relies on copying and pasting. While it will undoubtedly expedite the process of creating websites, much like Google and Stack Overflow have done, it will not replace the expertise of an experienced web developer—the person who fixed that bug that was stoping users from signing up to your service, this person identified that edge case that no one has written about, which means AI isn't able to copy and paste it from the internet.
yes, definitely agreed.
As most of the work has to be managed and implemented creatively, web developers have to be updated with time on how to take benefit of these tools. After all, the development time will be reduced significantly and people don't need to write code for static or simple web applications.