The End of Front-End Development

There are a variety of differences.

Frontend development involves a large number of fuzzy human bits that are constantly moving underneath you. Yes, your backend dependencies can change and you may need to update an API version, but in frontend you have browsers, screen readers, frameworks, and all sorts of massive icebergs largely outside of your control constantly moving.

In the backend, you probably have a language that is fairly stable. Write some unit tests, write some integration tests, but things are predictable and mockable.

Writing UI (properly) requires testing against several versions of several browsers, each with their own rendering quirks. UI tests - screenshots, whatever - are inherently flakier and when something breaks it's harder to know for sure if it's your fault.

You need to test against a variety of screen readers and accessibility tools. None of them are well documents, all of them parse the DOM (or native accessibility stack if you're not doing a web app) in a slightly different way, and the standards are constantly changing. As a bonus, you're legally obligated to get it "right", not that anyone can tell you precisely what "right" is.

Visual design isn't a walk in the park either. The designers will tell you to use color X. Its contrast ratio against colors Y, Z, and B on various pages will hopefully meet the contrast ratios, but then someone will point out that in exactly one of Windows' four different high contrast schemes this ends up being black on black and you will stare into a dark Lovecraftian abyss wondering what hellish algorithms Microsoft uses to pick colors. You'll fix HC Black and break HC white, you'll fix white and break black #2, and you will eventually throw your computer into the Marianas trench and go repair bicycles for a living.

Relevant:

https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1604513283972767745 Quote: 1960's Futurists: Automation will free mankind from meaningless tedium to focus on creative pursuits only human beings can master.

2020's Techbros: We're building AI that will write all your books, music, and TV so you can focus on the meaningless tedious of your cubicle job.

I see posts like this comparing past attempts, and in this article even 1990s Homestead, and I immediately think this person does not get it.

Additionally all the statements that follow along the lines of "GPT today has a hard time with xyz" are all problematic too. Today is not tomorrow, and what it can do tomorrow is what we should be talking about.

The fact is in just 3 months we've gone from fairly basic code reviews to super helpful code reviews with code examples and intelligent code contextual comments.

Comparing GPT to Homestead or any number of early attempts to translate mockup to HTML+JS is unhelpful. This is wildly different technology. Talking about what GPT can do today and landing at "it's not good enough" is also missing the point, we are nowhere near the limits of this tech and it's evolving so fast that these assessments are not insightful in the slightest.

Talking about GPT as being merely a probability evaluator is also demonstrating the authors limited insight. WE ARE ALL probability evaluators. Humans work on prior experience, employ heuristics to make decisions based on that. GPT, indeed all AI, is more or less based on that paradigm. The difference is an AI can hold the whole of its learning in a perfectly memorized model. It doesn't forget what's in that model and can draw on billions of data points to make its probabilistic determinations. We pull on bias, false memories, misunderstandings, and so on. Now, that's not to say AIs won't also be afflicted by these comprehension errors, but that just doubles down on AI doing what humans do which is astounding either way.

Jobs are going to be lost, it's a fact. Even if it's just that junior who was learning code reviews and supporting basic development, that job will be around for maybe a year or two at the rate we are moving.

Just want to say, I'm really enjoying your site, thanks for all the tuts, they're timely! Just decided to ditch Wordpress because my content is static. Wordpress is ridiculous bloat for that. With CSS grid and flexbox I can replicate easily in HTML. Only reason I adopted WP, ~ 2014, was to get a sidebar, and escape from the dreaded float. Comments are my only dynamic content, easily transferred to a forum.

Anyway most appreciated, thank you.

> Jobs are going to be lost, it's a fact. Even if it's just that junior who was learning code reviews and supporting basic development, that job will be around for maybe a year or two at the rate we are moving.

And how is that not a disaster for those who are out of work?