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The End of Front-End Development

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: The End of Front-End Development

#101

Post by badRNG »

monkeynotes wrote: post #98
badRNG wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Just as often with AI's detractors who claim that it "merely" predicts the next word, I have to wonder if those making these grandiose claims about th…

> I have to wonder if those making these grandiose claims about the near future of AI have actually used GPT-4 and its predecessors in their work I have used GPT-3 a fair bit, and used GPT-4 today. The differences are impressive, scary impressive so far. I am basing my `GPT(n+1)` observation on the rapid rate the tech is filling in holes that previous detractors pointed out. The differences in code reviews is amazing…

> If GPT-4 had ingested the entire code-base code reviews would easily be automated, humans would still do their passes but as a co-worker GPT would be invaluable. It would find swaths of missed efficiencies, fix slow SQL queries, look for testing gaps, and perhaps even assist in refactoring.

This is where my 3-5x efficiency improvement estimate came from for GPT4-based Copilot, especially for CRUD apps using popular frameworks, which while game changing is far from the great efficiency gains programming has seen in the past.

Compilers have conservatively led to 100x-1000x gains of efficiency at scale as have operating systems and various key libraries. GPT-assisted code generation doesn't yet seem to offer the same result. Even if it did, if history is our guide, this would lead to developers being able to generate far more economic value with less, which has consistently led to more developer jobs than before.

> Personally I think we are underestimating the potential, I feel like we are where the world was in 1990 looking at the emerging internet.

It doesn't feel correct to me to think of GPT-x as some technology similar to the internet as much as it is a way of experiencing the already existing internet, like a smart, context-aware search for specific details (though there aren't any good analogies for the role LLMs play/will play in tech moving forward.) If search engines had continued to improve with the momentum they had in the early days, we should've expected some experience not unlike GPT a decade ago (or more.)

> However, small studios do because they are cheap and serve a purpose where it's just WordPress maintenance and HTML POCs. Those jobs will disappear.

That seems very possible.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#102

Post by rikschennink »

ibn_khaldun wrote: post #94
rikschennink wrote: post #86

It’s not the “it’ll build websites” part that worries me, it’s the “it’ll browse the web for people” part. When it starts doing that the relevancy of interactivity and design on the web starts plummeting as less and less humans will use it.

Elaborate, please. This is a new take to me.

If there’s no humans browsing your webpage but it’s just AIs parsing it and using the forms, then why invest time, money, and resources in cool interactive components / subtle animations / responsiveness / etc.

AI won’t care. User won’t see it.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#103

Post by ibn_khaldun »

rikschennink wrote: post #102
ibn_khaldun wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate, please. This is a new take to me.

If there’s no humans browsing your webpage but it’s just AIs parsing it and using the forms, then why invest time, money, and resources in cool interactive components / subtle animations / responsiveness / etc. AI won’t care. User won’t see it.

I never thought of that. That would definitely put a spoil on common access to digital information in the long term. Perhaps it could even bifurcate the Web in the way that‘s been entertained before: a separate Web document environment and a separate Web application environment.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#104

Post by ramesh31 »

proc0 wrote: post #63
ramesh31 wrote: post #19

With a decade of experience as a front end dev in this industry, I have to agree with the premise, although not for the reasons stated. AI is, and will be, hugely disruptive for all fields of programming. But it won't be taking jobs any time soon. The reason front end development as a skillset is coming to an end is that we've solved all of the problems that front end devs were responsible for. Front end used to be a…

UIs have become more complex in parallel to more sophisticated tooling. Most websites now use persistent state and are reactive, where before those features were not as widespread. So I would say it has evolved, and the entry point for FE dev is closer to typical app development than before (which was closer to design and scripting).

> So I would say it has evolved, and the entry point for FE dev is closer to typical app development than before (which was closer to design and scripting).

This is kind of my point. UI development will always be a thing of course. But the "front end dev" was a phenomena of the early days of the web, and needing someone to wrangle the insane complexity of the browser. Nowadays you just install some framework and off you go without any concerns for browser issues. And so it becomes like any other programming environment, where the average developer of any skill set can do it sufficiently.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#105

Post by satvikpendem »

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #99
ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant, sounds even less automatable than what I assumed.

I mean if one day AI can meet with the client instead of me....

We already have them, they're called product managers /s

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#106

Post by ratorx »

Arainach wrote: post #72
ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #10

Frontend seems to involve visual design, which backend obviously doesn't (usually). Other than that, I don't see the difference, as soon as you're working on things more complex than simple static pages. Both will gradually become more efficiently done through smart use of AI tech. But replacement? ChatGPT and GPT4 can't solve real world problems without heavy time investment of an engineer to prompt-engineer a semi-…

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 languag…

These are valid differences, but none of them seem particularly challenging to an AI, assuming some equivalence between image and text recognition. To a human, sure because it is more difficult to formally specify. Arguably an AI could benefit from the fuzziness because the set of acceptable outputs is larger.

And I’d also say that the argument is a bit straw man-y because it considers (some of) the complexities of frontend, with a fairly ideal view of the backend. Once you bring concurrency, scale and state, backend can become fairly Lovecraftian as well.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#108

Post by JeremyNT »

hbn wrote: post #85
beauHD wrote: post #52

It's not that AI is going to replace certain jobs, it's that the people /not using AI/ will be out of a job because GPT et al are merely tools to get things done faster.

I have witnessed developers who are shockingly inefficient at getting work done quickly, but they get it done at the pace everyone's come to expect so it's never an issue. Obviously this doesn't apply to all workplaces, but there are a ton where the slowest workers set the bar for how fast things get done, and anyone who can get stuff done quicker works a couple total hours per week and is dicking around or in meetin…

I'm well familiar with this too. It's essentially a variant of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs."

Given how many BS jobs exist - and I've witnessed them personally - it's a bit early to declare LLMs the death of the programmer. It seems to me that the more likely outcome is that, rather than being put out of work, we programmers will become somewhat more efficient. Somebody has to babysit and evaluate the output of the robots, after all.

Does that translate to more actual productivity? Maybe in some cases, but given low expectations it might also just mean that we slack off even more. Perhaps ultimately, many more programming jobs will devolve into BS jobs.

Re: The End of Front-End Development

#110

Post by dkersten »

dkersten wrote: post #48
hk__2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This jokes only works if you never used flex.

Flexbox makes it a lot easier, but it’s not fool proof. I’ve had situations where even flex refused to center something because it was ensured strangely (but out of my control), or because the containers size wasn’t being inherited correctly (again be a use of parent elements out of my control). Compared to something like Qt/QML’s anchors and layouts, flexbox still feels like a crude hack, to me.

Too late to edit: “because it was nested strangely”
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