The asteroid currently hitting front end web development

The front end is not less risky to hand to the agent. There are a thousand different ways the agent could bork the UI and say it's good. And knowing how to babysit the AI/Agents doing the UI is more important than ever. Yeah I agree that developer education in the front end space seems to be diminishing, but let's not pretend like non of that matters anymore.

> Was that the first/only moment you had a draining/bad student? Seems quick to give up because of one bad experience, maybe this was repeating?

well, in 2025, not sure if related to agentic dev, but very likely, there is a very well felt drop in attention. also we figured there is a massive misproportion between people who have already used GPTs alongside classic dev, and those who have adopted or been exposed to agentic dev.

my surprise is that these people, being 3rd and 4th graders, were not equally exposed to harness-based dev, even though most are already employed on certain roles in actual companies.

> started leaning more towards the soft skills like how to collaborate, how to get a feel for when things are right/wrong, how to understand better/faster, and similar things,

well I agree this is important, but it is not a class in JS anymore. told the faculty staff we need to reinvent the program, and they are not even aware yet how damaging this impact is.

in all honesty - nobody knows at present moment what skills are needed to teach to people. besides, with LLMs, everyone curious enough can teach themselves.

so this changes massively the whole idea of knowledge transfer done by humans, does it not? we should teach other skills, not the technical trivia. i can give many examples, but this is going to eventually become very long post.

...

to add injury to insult, one of the team members invested early on in a 512GB mac studio, put some harness with Qwen on it and is currently collecting trading signals and doing finance. he expressed doubt there's more to do for him in the area, and he was perhaps one of the top notch ES6 devs I've ever known, with vast experience in UI and a long list of contracts (many of them got cancelled recently)!

So while many complain about their job security (due to AI), I can tell you the whole academia is nosing down rapidly. add to this the fact that most compute is concentrated in private enterprises - same entities that slurp my students afterwards and never say thanks.

Keyword is students, 5-10 years ago I was involved in teaching non-programmers how to develop so however people act once in the profession is irrelevant to this discussion really.

This is what I mourn the most too. The collaborative teaching and mentoring relationships. Not just for front end. Covid and now AI has just obliterated the software meetup and teaching space.

Well AI does whatever is told. or rather - expounds as per what the anchor (the prompt) started the generation. That is all - it doesn't do more. It has biases because of RLHF and other post-training, but not innate AI-bias. It's like... whatever you put in the archive will later on expound. But that's not the point realy.

The question is what is that we going to command the LLM do, how complete this requirement will be. But hold on - writing JS is not doing UX, and is not doing business analysis - definitely not the same thing.

JS is a general purpose language with fair amount of functional and declarative stuff in it, heavily influenced by Perl and LISP. So why would a person who's not inclined to dive in this matter (typically very hard stuff) would want to learn it, instead of spending a day out in the sun before the world ends? Well she did so (back in the day) mostly because there was a market demand for such skills.

And then we have autodidacts who don't need this type of education (not schooling!), and those that are not. The latter still want to take good salary and perhaps they can be trained into it. So, in essense, many people learned JS because there was a demand, and my prognosis is this demand for people writing JS goes down, not because the demand goes away, but because we won't be needing most of the JS code and perhaps also we won't be needimng UIs very soon (not in the same way we did before).

And, just imagine, if one's aware of first principles in programming, they can easily command the LLM/harness to create a perfectly working Swift code. Saying it because is exactly what myself did, even though this is remotely a language I am good at. Perhaps the amount of effort to get these libs right would've otherwise costed in the hundreds of thousands, now it costs 200$ a month for Fable/GPT6 and not-so-much-of-an-actual-understanding on my side, but a steady pace to keep the harness follow the road intended.

Why would then anyone want to learn JS, save for the fun of it?