4 ms·

I honestly think front end is kind of over or has a shelf life of maybe a few more years. Not sure how to go about planning my career according to this belief

by nwoli 3y ago

lhnz 3y ago
A lot of intellectual/software work is a bit like this though. It'll be interesting to see whether these AI tools scale into more complex work, as right now what you tend to see is a "good start point" but eventually the context of what you're building gets too large and the AI starts to produce junk.
gedy 3y ago
I disagree, because most of the frontend work I’ve been involved with over the past 10 years or so isn’t just blindly implementing mockups. Actual UI engineering work usually involves making the feature a logical reality. Product and UX have a great ideas, but they’re not engineers and it usually takes a lot of work to make these ideas match the reality of the domain, making things consistent with UI patterns, existing components, web standards, etc. I’m honestly not worried about AI being the programmer for UX people, that’s for sure. I think creating mockups are a bigger target for AI. Also, this work is usually the best starting point for a meaningful domain API, and helps drive the backend as well.
- yankaf 3y ago
  well, thats not how it will work, wait 5 more years, you will be either jobless or will have to transit to something else. Frontend is either for bots or for extremly creative people who can make stuff for bots, so they can get trained on it. and I agree if something like this can be done, Entire software engineering is going down, Most people even in the very complex seeming tasks are doing the copy paste thing, all day
  - gedy 3y ago
    Maybe, but backend seems more squeezed at companies I've dealt with TBH. Not AI related, but startup I was at introduced Hasura (GraphQL on top of Postgres), and eliminated most of the work the backend folks were doing (even though they didn't like mapping frontend API calls to data all day)
s__s 3y ago
I’m not convinced of that yet. Visual UI builders have been a thing for decades and this is more or less the same thing except the input mechanism has changed. Instead of point and click you’re prompting it with text. I think there are a lot of problems, but mainly I just don’t think it’s ever going to be practical to write and maintain software (front or backend) using conversational text prompts. It’s a very imprecise tool for the job.

I honestly think front end is kind of over or has a shelf life of maybe a few more years. Not sure how to go about planning my career according to this belief

by nwoli 3y ago

I honestly think front end is kind of over or has a shelf life of maybe a few more years. Not sure how to go about planning my career according to this belief

lhnz 3y ago

A lot of intellectual/software work is a bit like this though. It'll be interesting to see whether these AI tools scale into more complex work, as right now what you tend to see is a "good start point" but eventually the context of what you're building gets too large and the AI starts to produce junk.

gedy 3y ago

I disagree, because most of the frontend work I’ve been involved with over the past 10 years or so isn’t just blindly implementing mockups. Actual UI engineering work usually involves making the feature a logical reality. Product and UX have a great ideas, but they’re not engineers and it usually takes a lot of work to make these ideas match the reality of the domain, making things consistent with UI patterns, existing components, web standards, etc. I’m honestly not worried about AI being the programmer for UX people, that’s for sure. I think creating mockups are a bigger target for AI. Also, this work is usually the best starting point for a meaningful domain API, and helps drive the backend as well.

yankaf 3y ago
well, thats not how it will work, wait 5 more years, you will be either jobless or will have to transit to something else. Frontend is either for bots or for extremly creative people who can make stuff for bots, so they can get trained on it. and I agree if something like this can be done, Entire software engineering is going down, Most people even in the very complex seeming tasks are doing the copy paste thing, all day
- gedy 3y ago
  Maybe, but backend seems more squeezed at companies I've dealt with TBH. Not AI related, but startup I was at introduced Hasura (GraphQL on top of Postgres), and eliminated most of the work the backend folks were doing (even though they didn't like mapping frontend API calls to data all day)

s__s 3y ago

I’m not convinced of that yet. Visual UI builders have been a thing for decades and this is more or less the same thing except the input mechanism has changed. Instead of point and click you’re prompting it with text. I think there are a lot of problems, but mainly I just don’t think it’s ever going to be practical to write and maintain software (front or backend) using conversational text prompts. It’s a very imprecise tool for the job.