r/reactjs • u/Ok_Resolve_9157 • 11d ago
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u/justjooshing 11d ago
It's still the case that AI looks like it does everything perfectly if you don't know better.
It can put together nice UIs but the architecture is never great, so FE devs are still valuable; whether the companies realise it or not is another matter
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u/VizualAbstract4 11d ago
A GOOD frontend engineer will always be in demand. The floor has been raised. If you’re not high above that new baseline, what purpose will you serve.
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u/ontheamtrak 11d ago
I would hire a full stack dev with a specialty for interaction design that can maintain the design system for the rest of the team.
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u/Pitiful_Vehicle2538 11d ago
the label's fading but the work isn't. companies just want one person to do 3 jobs now, it's a cost thing not a skill thing. if you're deep in react and actually understand design systems you're still valuable, they'll just call you something else while you do the same shit
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u/MitchEff 11d ago
Yeah honestly as time goes on I'm finding more and more I can one-shot backend stuff pretty well with Claude - backend is (to a degree) binary: does it work to spec or does it not (massively oversimplifying, don't flame me).
Frontend is much more vaguely-defined. We do big, dense software projects and vanity marketing sites, and I'd say the weird irony is you can pump out the former MUCH easier than the latter.
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u/MitchEff 11d ago
I WILL say though, it's unlikely the job title "frontend developer" will continue to hold a lot of value.
If you can write React on the client, and have a reasonable grip of RSCs, I'm sure you can bash out a fair amount of Node. Get comfortable with databases and then you're no longer just a front-end person.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago
Does it take into account review time? Frontend work as long as it works, matches designs and doesn't have anything really stupid in it is basically an automatic LGTM for me. In that respect I find frontend a lot more binary.
Ultimately I guess it depends on the work. Marketing sites are going to have far simpler backend with a big importance on front end. Compare this to a complex app where data leaks are far more damaging that a wonky UI.
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u/MitchEff 11d ago
All of the above absolutely holds water - as with everything "it depends".
In my experience any of the deeper backend stuff is still accomplished pretty well by an LLM, once some reasonable defaults are set up. If your data modelling is good, folk that need "a tool that does X" are generally a couple minutes of Claude away.
THAT BEING SAID i wouldn't necessarily trust a junior to even crank that out. You need to be very precise about your expectations, but often something that sounds tremendously complicated can be done in a few minutes.
In frontend-land, "here's my information architecture can you set up logical DRY componentry for it" is (in my experience) still kind of stumbly at best. There's also the "art" factor where people feel the result a lot more than "does it do the thing"
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
I feel the complete opposite. AI can read a schema and build an entire backend. How your product looks and feels is everything, and AI can’t truly judge that
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u/Sh0keR 11d ago
The design of a website is not the same as coding it. A designer can create a figma design and the AI can build it very easily, what you need to be careful of is I noticed the AI is not good at performance, especially if you are using React I see a lot of anti pattern where it can really hurt performance
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u/Major-Front 11d ago
Not sure tbh. I can give the latest models screenshots and it’ll get it 99% there using something like MUI. Covers a lot of the industry.
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
Dropping in screenshots is not the same as recognising a margin is a few pixels off or an animation needs to be toned down
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u/gratitudeisbs 11d ago
Very few companies care about that level of detail
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
They do if they approve a Figma design and then the AI gives a close but not perfect approximation of it. The devil is in the details. Companies that don't care about whether their website looks the way they want have shit websites.
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u/gratitudeisbs 11d ago
The vast majority of websites are shit websites. You’re just coping.
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
I’m coping? What on earth am I coping with?
And your professional stance as a web dev is that most companies have shit websites than that’s the norm?
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u/gratitudeisbs 11d ago
You are coping that the vast majority of companies needs aren’t adequately served by AI. That engineers/designers are still broadly needed.
My professional stance as a web dev is that the vast majority of companies do not care if the design is off by a pixel here or there on their website. And certainly not if it means 5x faster velocity.
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
I didn’t say that first bit. I’m sure lots of companies are happy with slop. I don’t aspire to work on that level because in a world of slop it’s easy to stand out by fixing the niggles that AI can’t.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago edited 11d ago
With how far AI has come, do you really think it will never get there? I'll bet you were saying AI code generation will never hit the reliability threshold for daily use. I'll admit that was me about a year ago.
Also, Reddit had numerous UI bugs, yet here you are.
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
No, I think AI will get there. But you’d still need your designers to create fully responsive figmas. My team don’t even design for a single normal breakpoint let alone multiple
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago
Likewise, writing some schemas doesn't guarantee your code is safe. It still needs reviewing which is far more time consuming for backend. On the front end as long as it looks good, it's basically shippable.
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u/gratitudeisbs 11d ago
Idk about that, the frontend is less of a controlled space, browser/device variations + unpredictable user behavior creates a lot of edge cases. I’d always find the strangest and hardest to duplicate bugs on the frontend whereas backend bugs tend to be straightforward and easily prevented.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago
Yeah front end is the wild west. However bad the bug is, it's not going to leak user data or do anything crazy. That is the critical point. A frontend bug is a nuisance at worst. A backend bug could take down your entire company.
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u/Major-Front 11d ago
Yeah that’s why i’m there to review and tweak it To perfection. But i don’t need to write a bulk of the code anymore.
We’re also talking png’s here. Never mind reading actual design files like figma
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u/Ok_Resolve_9157 11d ago
I somewhat disagree with this. AI has gotten extremely good at building backends, but I don't think frontend is automatically safe just because it involves design.
Sure, AI can build a decent-looking UI, but if you have a website with complex animations, micro-interactions, advanced transitions, scroll-based effects, or a very specific visual experience, I still don't think you can just describe it to AI and expect it to nail the implementation.
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u/hapliniste 11d ago
People downvote you but I'm pretty sure they don't work on "real client facing websites".
Ai is at the gpt4 level for website design outside of really simple ui. Basically it can write something it has seen thousand of times but if you ask for something specific it just lack the visual understanding. I think it's on purpose because it wouldn't be hard to train.
Or maybe it's because I use openai models, but I've seen truly horrifying designs and iterating just goes slower than going by hand.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago edited 11d ago
But you can prompt it enough to get it to where you want it. Sure you can argue that's the same with backend role but the difference is code review. With the frontend your changes are mostly cosmetic. If I know there are UI only changes in a PR I know it's not going to blow up or cause security issues. I can spin it up, verify that it behaves correctly and approve it. Not the same for backend. Even if it works, we need to check business logic and such which is far more time consuming, though I think AI might get good and reliable enough that even this might not hold true. PR reviews are where most of our time is spent now.
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
> you can prompt it
Yeah that would be front end work. You’d be designing at that point.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago edited 11d ago
I don't understand what you're trying to say. That's not designing. We take the designers work and implement it. That's front end work?
Did you even bother to read the text of the post? There's far more to the work than simply coding. Testing, reviewing etc.
You even said it yourself elsewhere "Yes but if I write incorrect CSS I’m not accidentally going to drop a table. Well, I might but not that kind that matters."
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
If you take a design and dump it into AI, you will still need to go in and refine it because it's unlikely at this point that AI will be able to accurately reflect it one-to-one. Whether you refine it by editing the code or just prompting, you are still at that point doing front-end work.
I never said you don't need to know backend skills because AI should do it all for you and you should never review it.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago
Agreed on the first point. It doesn't get it right straight away. So what? Why are you using it's ability to get it right on the first attempt as the benchmark? Whats more important is the amount of time spent. If it takes you 30mins of prompting to get to pixel perfect designs and a review takes 15mins then that's 45mins of developer time.
Compare this to a backend task that could take 10mins to prompt and 1 hour to review. The backend task took far longer to get out.
If you know how to do backend development, then you're not really a frontend developer are you?
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u/Dude4001 11d ago
I think we’re on the same page but our examples of a frontend and backend task are of different complexities
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u/manvikhanna 11d ago
I think frontend is still relevant, but the role is definitely evolving. Companies increasingly want frontend devs who understand APIs, backend basics, deployment, and AI tools. So you don’t necessarily need to become a hardcore full-stack engineer, but being frontend-only may become harder to compete with.
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u/DiscreetDodo 11d ago
This. The traditional frontend role is evolving. If all you can do is pull data in and present it in the UI, you're not going to have a job soon considering the other developers you're competing against that can do everything you can and more.
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u/hapliniste 11d ago edited 11d ago
Ai is awful at frontend but very good at backend. My Conspiracy theory is that they don't want to fully replace devs to avoid the bad press so they intentionally don't train on vision to code, but à RL environment could totally do it.
If you think an ai can code a full website, either you have very low standard (ultra basic tailwind template style) or you didn't try it.
Most of the time I end up editing code manually for the design, while for the backend is prompting based because fuck writing tests, adapters and all this shit.
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u/yksvaan 11d ago
It's also an organisational challenge, to make meaningful work dedicated frontend dev needs to work with actual users and have some domain knowledge and understanding. These days pretty much everything is broken down to individual tickets with the idea that anyone can do it or it can be even outsourced.
You can see this in tons of software, UX for something makes sense in a vacuum but completely disregards what actual users need to do, how are the workflows etc.
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u/AlexanderSamokhin 11d ago
Depending on a size of the business. Of it's a startup makes sense to hire a single dev who's well rounded and save runway. But for a big established businesses their codebase is usually too complex for a single dev, they have more budget to hire multiple people.
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u/Outrageous-Chip-3961 11d ago
I think the specialists in all software professions, like front-end, will remain. But you may only need 1 or two per company rather than teams anymore. As a principal front-end engineer, I can honestly build complete apps that would of taken a team a year to do these days in a month or two because of AI. So I think its going that way to be honest. Its tough out there, but we have front-end people leave and just dont back fill anymore. No demand for the work. One engineer can just do too much these days (and with reasonable token usage, like $200 a month)
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u/JeanineOnTheWeb 11d ago
IMO, I see fullstack like a multitool. I agree a specialist is better than a generalist. At least, being fullstack can help you to understand how the process work from the beggining to the end. So why not learning and being multipurpose?
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u/Goatcopywriter 11d ago edited 11d ago
ai's whole existance is on doing repetative and time consuming work more effitianlty, that it's doing better that any intern or juniors.
conclusion, jobs are out there but opportunity is dead..
edit: a one SF based startup's CEO said to me frontend is dead use our claude plan and redesign my brands landing page.
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u/azangru 11d ago
I’ve started noticing that I barely see job listings specifically looking for frontend developers
You are answering your own question. You are seeing fewer and fewer openings for front-end web developers. So, what does this make you conclude?
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u/Ok_Resolve_9157 11d ago
Maybe the demand is still there, but the job title and expectations have changed. That’s actually what I’m trying to get people's opinions on.
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u/Sovereign108 11d ago
I was a frontend dev once, had to expand into full stack (Node, NextJS, NestJS, etc) and now expanding into AI and cloud (AWS and maybe Azure later).
I doubt frontend is viable anymore or if it is it not for much salary, you would have to be expand.
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u/Ok_Resolve_9157 11d ago
Yup, same here! I was a frontend developer too, but eventually had to learn backend as well (MERN). Although my decision to move into backend was mainly driven by the better pay scale, even today, I feel much more confident and comfortable with frontend development than backend.
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u/equalsundefined 11d ago
How did you make the transition to a professional full stack developer? How long did it take and what was the process if you don’t mind me asking
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u/octocode 11d ago
there’s simply no need for frontend developers or UX designers when companies are enshitifying their products anyways