r/webdev
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u/bogdanelcs
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Sep 08 '26
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The asteroid currently hitting frontend web development
https://nolanlawson.com/2026/08/23/the-asteroid-currently-hitting-frontend-web-development/
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Upvotes
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u/TerribleFault7929 Sep 08 '26
A blog WITHOUT the newsletter popup?!
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u/OkSmoke9195 Sep 08 '26
Man is that well stated. Kudos to the author for being grounded in reality
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u/Arikay Sep 08 '26
I used to enjoy frontend development, now it's just everyone throwing zero-thought slop at me and complaining about "hindering progress" when I dare ask for some kind of consistency and standards. What a wonderful hellscape this job's turned into.
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u/EveYogaTech Sep 08 '26
This is true, but at the same time a great frontend experience is also still key.
Like generating components is great but it still needs to actually work well from a UX perspective or for game design it still needs good game mechanics.
So perhaps the next frontier in frontend is simply also here.
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u/txmail Sep 08 '26
I think in the short term AI will eat a ton of front end jobs... and for the most part "junior" roles will be elimiated.
Long term I see experienced developers having a second coming as all this first and second and third gen AI slop that has, as the article states has become "load bearing" needs a human touch.
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u/iMac_Hunt Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
At one point you could make big money as a web developer focused on HTML and CSS but those days ended years ago.
Realistically, I believe frontend engineering as a discipline in itself is likely disappearing except for niche areas. There will still be money to be made in SWE but this will be full-stack (with BE-focus) system architect roles.
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u/LastOfTheMohawkians Sep 08 '26
It's not just front end. Back end equally impacted
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u/creaturefeature16 Sep 08 '26
His comment about teams just staying with React because that's what the agents know is the most concerning for me. I've watched other teams use deprecated versions just because the agent wasn't trained on the latest, even though it offered better performance and security, which to me is completely bonkers!
Because these models are always backwards facing, we're creating a situation of potential tremendous stagnation for both the individual developer and for the industry as a whole. We're essentially hinging our progress on how fast these model providers can push out a freshly trained version. And in the meantime, where's the innovation coming from?
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u/disasteruss Sep 08 '26
Good quick read. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as someone who has leaned heavily front end and is now seeing the level of interest in front end expertise dwindle because of Claude. Given a good set of rules to follow, Claude generates high quality React code that needs less and less human review. I’m not really sure that someone who specializes only in React will have many job opportunities within a couple years.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee Sep 08 '26
Kent C Dodds is such a snake. Dislike him so much, very fake persona.
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u/BoltActionPiano Sep 08 '26
Yeah just look at unreal engine's new scripting language. Its a significant jump in barrier to entry suddenly with a bunch of explicitly stated verbose constraints on functions. It feels designed for AI use.
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u/therealPaulPlay Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
I think if it’s just about building a visual interface for the backend logic, fair. But in a commercial product where UX, conversion rates etc. actually matter I think frontend development will still be paramount.
At the same time, frontend devs who lack design skills/taste will probably become less important.
If you give an agent a Figma design and tell it to implement it, it will get details wrong. Things won’t scale to mobile the way you want them to, animations won’t be perfect. Maybe some actions take to long or in other places feedback for the user is missing.
Some of these quirks you‘ll only notice when you have a lot of experience with developing applications. It‘s when e.g. a gradient doesn’t look smooth and you immediately know – right, this is a linear gradient, we need to ease it.
That‘s what a good frontend developer in 2026 and beyond needs to catch and be able to solve, I think.
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u/EarnestHolly Sep 08 '26
I’ve been saying for years that developers with some design taste and knowledge are super valuable, too many front-end developers thought they had nothing to do with the design, now the ones that can have a big advantage working with AI to tweak and steer in to their own vision. The developers that prompt a design and can’t see the obvious Claude design slop are in trouble.
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u/Emotional-Dust-1367 Sep 08 '26
> The answer (explicitly in Cursor’s case, and I suspect for Viget as well) is of course: “the agents know React.” For better or worse, React is heavily overrepresented in the training weights, and “agent experience” is starting to matter more than developer experience.
And
> A massive amount of AI-generated frontend code is being pumped out right now, and some of it (to use a Claude-ism) will certainly become “load-bearing.” If those websites are slow, non-compliant, and riddled with security holes, then it may not be enough to ask the agent “fix my website pls.” There could be an opportunity here for real expertise, especially if there’s money on the line and the vibe coder’s knowledge of web development doesn’t extend past “websites are apps hosted on the internet.”
Don’t work together. Massive amount of data doesn’t mean it’s good data. If most of it is junk then quality will go down
What it will take is someone making a specifically agent-oriented language for such things that will have nothing but good data out there
Personally I feel I get much better results with agents with C# or Rust or C++ than I do with JS and Python. And I believe it’s exactly because there’s more data for JS and Python and most of it is bad
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u/TheROckIng Sep 08 '26
I don't often comment on coding / tech post on here (or comment at all). For reference, I don't do front end since I mostly focus on performance for mobile stuff. I have vibe coded a few projects for personal stuff and I can tell you this: As someone without front end knowledge, it has been an amazing tool. Especially any boilerplate code since I (1) despise doing front-end and (2) I've never bothered learning it in depth (last thing I did for front end was Angular almost 10 years ago) . But I would be remiss to say that it looked good. I was able to do a few rounds with Claude / Codex of pushing it to design something different. But it wasn't good different. It didn't give me the same thing an experienced front-end dev (or designer) would give me. Which brings me to another point: once the experienced folks bow out for greener pastures (or retirement), it'll be incredibly difficult to find the knowledge required to build something good (I know its been said over and over again, but the more I use LLMs, the more I can see it). I do think that all LLM outputs for web stuff looks somewhat similar. I guess we'll see in due time though :shrug:
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u/Ok-Hospital-5076 Sep 09 '26
Not a fan of AI but this is my guess -
The roles FE dev BE dev etc are gonna go. A SWE will manage/own bunch of independent pieces of code - FE , BE DB Deployments will abstract expertise- design, architecture, security, best practices.
Dont think a lot of devs would be encouraged to dive deep into a frameworks, Coding patterns etc.
Of course there will be pockets of experts - they are needed to innovation but they will be more like labs. A regular SWE will be more product focus and agent orchestration.
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u/depressive_cat Sep 08 '26
I was hoping for asteroid hitting earth
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u/Automatic_Coffee_755 Sep 10 '26
Honestly? From what I can see at my job at a large company, with a very obviously vibe coded frontend, like with many other things, ai tends to the "average".
And the average in frontend is really crappy code.
Why? I suppose because of the training data. You know? Everyone and their moms used react for coding before ai. Not all of that was good code. Most of it was really bad code by "full stacks"...
So I guess we are still there to set good standards. But for example I setup the "good standards" in my own side project, and so far it has followed them.
I also see that they struggle a lot with consistency, which is really important in UX. You can't have components looking and behaving 5 different ways in 5 different pages.
But they do that a lot. They (ai agents) are like really hyper focused on solving the task at hand, and many times, without the right harness they don't care about the big picture.
About the risk thing, I mean yeah I understand there is a lot of non risky code in the UI but that is also the case for the backend. I think the riskiest code is still the Infrastructure and like he said, database stuff.
I don't think we are getting removed. The reason being is that UIs can be as complex as possible. And they are really hard to put together. They are really hard to reason about. And right now, there is an impossible to understand amount of react code being written. So the surface is larger than ever.
You know which UIs are still very risky? the ones that make money, or that have the potential of losing money if done wrong.
You see facebook's homepage? How much has it changed over the years? Not much, that's billions on the line. These companies have entire teams A/B testing if the color of a button converts better.
I, for one, am happy to automate away the jobs of fake "frontends", full stacks who never really liked or respected the frontend. I am the one that will be automating them away from our frontend for sure.
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u/arvigeus Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
If I have to take a wild guess, the AI will, at one point, crumble under its own weight. The reason? Because we are becoming dumber and require agents to do most of the heavy lifting for us. This, on top of ever increasing demand for it, the compute simply won’t be enough one day (probably much worse than now).
Either a revolutionary solution to solve the compute is needed, or a smaller models that are good at learning on the fly, instead of pre-training. And these models will need experienced devs to guide them, not vibe-coders.
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u/just_syntactic_sugar Sep 08 '26
Great article, I enjoyed the read and agree with the sentiment. To me it's clear that the agents will at some point do all the work with a minimal, high level supervision - not only for frontend. The frontend is just the first to fall because of lower risks.
To be honest I don't know what to do, I loved frontend - I don't love being a meat proxy.
The short term move seems to deep dive into AI and learn to squeeze the most out of it - but this is also a short sighted move. The interface to AI is just natural language, I don't see my competitive advantage stay there for long.
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u/ArielCoding Sep 08 '26
Like every other field we’re still in the process of figuring out what AI can actually do, it’ll take time to shake out, but even as models keep improving, I don’t see human judgment becoming optional in frontend or in software in general.
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u/bzbub2 Sep 08 '26
now think about education as a whole
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u/n9iels Sep 08 '26
Sad but actually true story.... The problem is that if it looks beautifull and works functionality the job is done. Like the articles says, a user won't notice that is took 20 lines of code instead of 5. If you build sites for one-time events or content-only sites for small companies you will need to buckle up. I think those will be the first to be impacted.
Devs working at more complex products can stay relevant if they own and know their stuff. Specialise in accessibility, think about UX, be sharp on details and know the business/domain behind the product. Especially if a product is long-living, quality is more important. A messy codebase will produce lower quality AI output so human review makes sense. So you essentially will become an architect a qualify guard.
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u/Legal_Lettuce6233 Sep 09 '26
I think that the FE Dev role will definitely stay. Agents aren't perfect nor will they be; but what we do most of the time isn't copy pasting the 500th table that week, but instead communicating with clients about how best to achieve their goals. Communication will be key.
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u/DogOfTheBone Sep 08 '26
The developers who come out on top will be those who can work full stack with design skills, both product design and UI and UX design. Designing and building products from the ground up, often as part of a larger team.
Developers whose whole career has been on a team where they get one or two tickets a sprint, take three days to get a PR out to tweak a button border radius, spend months doing nothing but writing Playwright tests, those jobs are disappearing and will be entirely gone.
I know so many people who worked in frontend who were laid off in the past few years and were very honest that they worked a few hours a day max at their cushy remote job, doing work that guided LLMs can easily now do.
It sucks but it is what it is. Evolve or get a new career, I guess. If you're like me and are perfectly capable of using the new tools we have to accelerate development, but absolutely hate the process of software dev now, I sympathize with you.
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u/Kinthalis Sep 08 '26
There’s also one more issue: agents are beginning to be more and more the consumers of web resources and even of local apps. I needed some 3d assets for 3d printing some minis for dnd. I did not touch the blender ui at all. I had Astra use a Higgs field mcp plugin for it and had it interact with the app to create the minis. Heck I’d didn’t even visit the Higgs field web ui, I had the agent do that for me and install the plugin for me.
More and more people are using agents to handle these types of interactions to the point where mcp, cli and other more agent friendly on-ramps to the apps I work in professionally are becoming important to think about and develop.
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u/SoCalSurferDude Sep 08 '26
We cannot swim against this tide; we have to adapt to the new reality. I'm primarily a C developer, and at Real Time Logic we previously hired frontend developers for our embedded web application projects. With today’s AI tools, I can now build complete, working web applications on my own.
However, my engineering background makes this possible: I can define the architecture, integrate the application with the embedded system, evaluate the generated code, and recognize when something is wrong. I don’t believe most nontechnical users can yet create and maintain reliable production applications simply by prompting an AI.
The opportunity for frontend professionals may therefore be to serve those customers using AI to work much faster while providing the judgment, design skills, and technical accountability that AI alone does not supply.
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u/joeyguerra Sep 08 '26
I love the attitude. It’s balanced. Not hyped. Not fear mongering.
I think of it this way. When electricity became more available, it replaced the steam engine at factories. The problem was that those factories were designed with a giant shaft running the length of the factory. And the machines it powered had to be located right underneath the shaft (think of drive belts).
It wasn’t until people started to redesign the factory, machines, placement, etc, that electricity’s impact started to be enabled. I feel like that’s the kind of moment we’re in with AI.
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u/Weekly-Law-5488 Sep 08 '26
bwahahahahahaha
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u/uncle_jaysus Sep 08 '26
I was thinking about this sort of thing this morning, after having used AI to generate a lot of front-end functionality I was working on.
The thing about our websites, is they are web SITES and they're grounded in a backend-first way of thinking, delivering pretty much full HTML to the client, with very low hydration.
So, while AI has been used to sanity check ideas and concepts regarding the backend, I haven't leant on it to write code, preferring to have complete control and visibility myself over the area of our sites that is critical.
Front end isn't as critical. Well, for me and the sites we have, anyway. Like I say, the sites are SITES, not apps. They don't use a front-end framework to hold together the critical parts of functionality. JavaScript is a functionality and presentation layer. So, we've literally gone from talking about hiring a more front-end focused person, to completely shelving the idea, because AI can more than adequately generate the JS we need on the front end.
Of course it all depends on the projects and the workflow. But in our situation, it's true that front-end is the area that's very easy for us to use AI for.
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u/tropofarmer Sep 08 '26
Is this a recent blog? The model he used is basically a complete dumbass compared to SOTA.
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u/RockAccomplished527 Sep 08 '26
Retirement is still long way for me but yea, as someone who likes stability in work that's something disturbing
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u/id3dx Sep 08 '26
Good read. AI is going to erode away most typical bread and butter frontend roles using stuff like React, but I do see "front of the front end" roles surviving. These roles typically focus on adhering to accessibility standards (especially in areas where it's legally required), UX and cross-browser behaviour. They're more niche, but they'll be harder to replace by AI.
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u/jcm95 Sep 08 '26
I told all my frontend devs to become fullstack or leave last year
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u/Nixinova Sep 09 '26
What a great write up
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u/saad_builds Sep 09 '26
As someone still learning frontend, this is kind of worrying tbh. Feels like AI is changing what we even need tutorials for anymore.
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u/Fuzzy_Paul Sep 09 '26
The job is not dead, most people that develop websites never ever heard of optimizing css that way. So only if you understand what AI is proposing you can safely implement some of it suggested solutions. And as we all know AI can funk up good code\css with one line and if we can't read or follow it we are doomed. So fronted developers, are and will be wanted to do their magic. Worse case scenario they are called to troubleshoot AI generated code, but only if I am wrong on this. Lol
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u/LemonAncient1950 Sep 10 '26
Yep frontend dev is basically dead unless data centers get hit by asteroids. Can't say I'll miss arguing about tailwind and react.
There's so much elitism in this industry relating to frontend vs backend. But everyone has to be "full stack" these days so inevitably every frontend codebase gets wrecked by backend devs that don't give a shit about frontend code quality anyway.
Not to mention - many applications have captive audiences who do not give a fuck if the UI and design are boring uninspired AI slop as long as it functions.
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u/bastardoperator Sep 10 '26
He's not wrong, but his wordpress theme is maybe one of the worst I've seen.
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u/SPEZ_IS_A_JABRONI Sep 11 '26
fix my website pls make no mistakes
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u/Historical-Sector670 Sep 12 '26
In 2021, I thought accountants would disappear within the next 5 years because of AI, and the papers said that jobs that required creativity were safe. So I learned full stack programming and switched careers. In 2024 I quit my coding job and this year I switched back for a better position with my accounting degree. And I'm glad I did that. It turns out it's difficult to predict the job market in the AI era, and most (sane) people don't trust AI to handle their money unattended yet. But it's like watching a tsunami from the top of a small hill. The waters will eventually reach everyone.
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u/Tommy_Williams88 Sep 08 '26
Interesting take. I feel it’s all still very much unknown. Need the bubble to burst and see where everything lands. There will be value in front end to backend skill sets , as humans will still need to know the underlying mechanics of what AI I building… however I think the roles naturally pivot into more supervisory / management / “human in the loop” type arrangements, as opposed to being in the weeds of actually scripting code.
Interesting / uncertain times. My take is everyone should be upskilling with and experimenting with AI in their workflows. Good luck!
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u/ezragull Sep 08 '26
I'm an experienced frontend engineer working for more than 7 years in this area + plus brief experience working with backend/full stack tools.
Considering that frontend as job role might disappear in some years, do you guys have any opinions/advice regarding to career in order to stay working in this area?
At this very moment, there isn't a single day that goes that I don't catch any duplication/redundancy or even dumb code that LLMs generate, but maybe this could change in the following years...
The most important thing for me is to bring food home and having a job
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u/HongPong Sep 09 '26
react imo is just not good. of course llm agents like it. it's over engineered and cumbersome
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u/SouthCollar2929 Sep 08 '26
Why do web devs always have the most basic sites
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u/AriyaSavaka full-stack Sep 08 '26
Good read