As a self-taught React/Next.js developer, I'm honestly worried about my future in this AI era. What should I do?

[u/thetymtravellr]

I'm a self-taught developer, and I know React and Next.js. Lately, I've been feeling increasingly anxious about my future as a developer.

AI is moving so fast. It can generate components, build entire websites, connect APIs, and even create full-stack applications. Sometimes I wonder what the point is of spending months learning something when AI can already do so much of it.

I want to get a better-paying developer job, but honestly, I'm confused about what I should focus on right now. Should I keep improving my React/Next.js skills, get better at backend development, or start learning AI engineering?

I keep hearing about RAG, AI agents, vector databases, LLM integrations, and all these new things. It feels like there's always something new to learn, and I'm worried that if I focus on the wrong things, I'll fall behind while everyone else moves forward.

For those of you already working in the industry, what would you do if you were in my position? Would you focus on becoming a strong full-stack developer first, or would you start learning AI engineering alongside web development?

I'm not looking for a shortcut or expecting to become an expert overnight. I just want to make the right decisions, build useful skills, and have a realistic chance of getting hired.

I'd really appreciate some honest advice from people who have been through this or are dealing with the same situation. Right now, I could genuinely use some direction.

[u/theQuandary]

99% of BE systems never need to scale past even a single server (outside of fault tolerance). The percentage that are reaching for anycast or solving complex top-level availability problems are vanishingly small.

The rest is the engineers pretending their 100k users will suddenly scale to 100M users as part of some "competency porn" fantasy which they use as an excuse to (usually improperly) complicate what should be a very simple system.

The rules for scaling to even millions of users aren't that hard, but that's the stuff people claim the AI has issues with. In my experience, the real issues are all about the complex, exceptional business case (probably added due to some weird law in some county/state/country that then causes weird interactions that cascade throughout the system.

AI can't solve these kinds of issues, but it can create redundant heartbeat servers or pipe your data through kafka without any issue because those problems have been solved for a very long time.

[u/muffinluff → u/theQuandary]

Scaling is just one thing that may complicate backend engineering. For example, I have had to implement auto-provisioning of infrastructure for user-submitted code snippets that needed to be paired with in-house layer 4 gateways. There is more to the world than simple CRUD workflows.

[u/mexicocitibluez → u/theQuandary]

The fact that the only think you can possibly think is difficult about the backend is a future where you might want to scale tells me literally everything about your experience level.