Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

iLoveOncall

> JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand I'm sorry but that simply does not make any sense. How is increasing the breadth of your skills leading to a deskilling?

WesolyKubeczek

> frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing I remember this period differently. The frontend work was mostly, sometimes solely, all about turning whatever monstrous PSD came from the designer’s sick mind into HTML, and getting shafted if the result was not pixel-for-pixel identical. When project leads heard the word “semantic”, they had to reach for the dictionary. Upon hearing the word “accessibility”, they would set the dictionary on fire.

23david

I think it's more likely to cause a lost Decade of people not going into CS or tech due to lack of entry-level jobs. Maybe next time there's a boom and the pendulum of the power dynamic between management and labor swings more towards the workers, tech workers will unionize or organize better. I think overall it will benefit the industry because these boom and bust cycles for employment are just not healthy.

kristianc

I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling the "deep expertise" OP laments was actually deeply inconvenient to many people. I understand that there's a good living to be made from knowing browser quirks, hand-rolling accessible components, mastering CSS specificity, but this is largely accidental complexity. More people building things is straightforwardly good, and if some of those things are slower or less accessible, that's a tradeoff people are entitled to make. You can argue that abstractions hide consequences that fall on users who didn't choose them, but I'd argue back that LLMs likely have a better understanding of a11y conventions than I do as well.

Npovview

if you value intelligence (and likely income from that intelligence) above all other human qualities, you're gonna have a bad time. -Ilya.

Zababa

The part on the Bauhaus movement is weird, and I'm not sure I agree about how the author thinks about users. >What did previous generations of craftspeople do when everyday goods and buildings suddenly could be mass-produced by industrial processes? One reaction was to copy the style of old, and make the industry crank out widgets and buildings that at least looked like they were handcrafted. Is this a reaction by craftspeople? I don't think it is, I think this was what industry people did? >Countering this trend of historicism, an alternative approach was developed by the Bauhaus movement of the early 20th century. Instead of pitting factory workers against craftspeople, their stated goal was to have them work together, and redevelop the arts and crafts with industrial manufacturing processes in mind. From what I understand the Bauhaus movement has/had a huge influence on modern architecture, which people tend to like less than traditional architecture [1]. It feels weird to have that followed by "Caring about quality and the user". >The industrialization enabled lots of cheap plastic products, designed by people who didn’t take the time to think how they would be used and by whom – yet good industrial design is still a thing. >And software like Wix and Next.js enabled the creation of lots of websites that load terribly slow and are not accessible – yet there are still practitioners of the front of the frontend out there. I think the author really really really underestimates how important is it that something is "cheap". I personally like a lot having the option to use cheap and relatively good stuff, or pricier and better stuff, for most things. This is a bit stretching the definition of "accessibility" but, I think in a way price should be thought as part of accessibility. If we consider that it's important that websites work well on slow networks, partially because not everywhere in the world has access to good network, partially because good networks cost money ; then I think we should consider that while a good website beats a bad website, sometimes a bad website beats no website. Sometimes a "cheap plastic product" means someone that can't buy the well designed product can still buy a product, and get started in a hobby. This is pretty bad news for craftsmen I think, but as a software engineer that is very happy to be able to get into crochet or photo or cyanotypes or pottery or hiking for relatively cheap, I can't help but try to see the other side of software getting cheaper. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026427511...

ElProlactin

> And we’re saddened that the new process results in lower quality work, and that a lot of people just don’t seem to care. 1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. There was a lot of mediocrity and worse. 2. I'm not sure the work is "lower quality" depending on how you define "quality". AI might result in an uncomfortable uniformity but at the same time, a lot of AI work product is pretty darn usable because the models have been trained against conventions that, love them or hate them, "work" for the vast majority of end users.

neuroblaster

Very interesting, i didn't know that frontend developers experienced deskilling before. I thought that slop was the usual way of doing things in frontend (or backend). Apparently deskilled people are making it look like this is normal and it supposed to be so. But i can relate to that. Another examples of deskilling would be, of course, Java, and a more modern example - Rust. That said, i don't think deskilling is solving mass-production problem. It was already solved with open-source software, or with a software as is. Software is information and there is little to no cost of copying information. So mass-production isn't the problem that is being solved here. IMO the problem being solved is that business need unskilled labor, that is slop. You would think that if business is producing slop, it will be replaced with another business producing quality stuff. If that was so, over time, there won't be any slop on the market, but if you open your app store, you are welcomed by all kinds of slop. Because slop is what they buy. Supply is only following the demand, business need to produce slop because people are buying it. How many of you guys have Claude subscription? Do you know that 5 years ago i would be asking "How many of you guy have GitHub Copilot subscription"? This is what people buy, so it is deskilling, but not a mass-production, it's just slop revolution, slop is the new norm.

wongarsu

We already had a phase of "deskilled" frontend development: Adobe Flash. Any designer could open it and create interactive websites in it, no CSS or HTML knowledge required. Some slight JS knowledge (rebranded as ActionScript) you could get full interactivity, and animations were fully editable in UI. Sure, all of this came at a terrible price: no accessibility, no SEO discovery, huge loading times. But it also created some of the most innovative and artistic front ends. And a lot of things that should have never seen the light of day SVG+CSS+HTML were hailed as the modern replacement for Flash, but nobody ever made an authoring tool suitable for the masses. LLMs are kind of fixing that, just with a very different interface

yanis_t

Are we getting some real data in any industry really where AI eating jobs? I was kinda expecting those to kick in by now, but don't think it's happening.

sublinear

> frontend used to be a highly specialized skill, requiring knowledge of semantic HTML, CSS, the differences of various browsers, accessibility, progressive enhancement, network performance, interface design and user testing – to just name a few. It still is! > To distinguish what they’re doing from what “frontend” has become, practitioners of this arcane art nowadays often refer to it as the “front of the frontend”. I have never heard this term before, but I'm sure someone will point me to the bullshit influencer who came up with it? Frontend frameworks are really just for web apps and most frontend devs are familiar with several. If they cannot also write a web page from scratch, they're not really a web dev. This is not up for debate. If you hire someone for the role, you need them to handle the work. AI is not going to help you here when it gets into the testing and bugfix phase.

efsher_azoy2

My humble opinion: “deskilling” is an illusion. Sure, I don’t write code by hand anymore, but I spend most of my time using the knowledge and “sixth sense” I’ve developed throughout my career to control what AI is doing. At the end of the day, I have to make more architectural and business decisions than before - it’s just higher-level and more complex work. On the other hand, there’s increasingly little reason to hire someone just to write APIs or work on the frontend, since AI handles most of the routine tasks. So, this feels much more like the Industrial Revolution than “deskilling.”

kangalioo

The "frontend skills" whose growing irrelevance are bemoaned in this article consist largely of navigating a minefield of unintuitive edge cases, browser incompatibilities, historic baggage, exceptions to exceptions to exceptions. Modern frontend, or the "tower of leaky abstractions", is finally a common-sense mental model for web development. Supplanted by force on top of an exploding bag of eccentricities that is web standards and conventions. The fact that it works at all and is merely a little leaky is an accomplishment in itself.

culebron21

I worked mostly on frontend in 2012-16, in plain HTML+CSS, and then quit, because React was required everywhere, and I tried and hated it. But before React, I don't recall frontend as very inspiring and joyful. It was fun to see your work immediately on the screen. I did apply skills and had to solve some weird situations. I could optimize our CSS with OOCSS approach (later used in Bootstrap) -- only to complaints -- semantics! too many classes! (my trump card was that their commits contained +200 lines of CSS, while mine mostly had 0 -- and our CSS was already bloated into several megabytes). But this was a dead end. I tried making tools to find out unused styles, to automate some patterns -- like click a button and load some content over Ajax. But the guys, who copy-pasted code with dumb solution to this, got 2-3x more tickets closed. I proposed a tool to make screenshots of pages and diff them to search for regressions, but the response was it's heavy RnD, we're not a research institute, we got to ship the next popup tomorrow, etc. Nobody gave a shit much earlier.

mariopt

I’m using AI to create UIs and I find myself having more time to think about UX rather than CSS. It actually gave me “time” to quickly test design ideas an implement minor details. I’m actually building better UIs just because it became less time consuming to do so. There is just a super noisy minority that spams the internet with slop so bad that no one can take their product seriously.

cmiles8

While AI coding helps a ton in building product prototypes, it also results in products that folks spot as AI from a mile away. Literally just saw startup demo their app and their app which had that “vibe coded UI” look to it. They were given devastating feedback of “Guys this is kinda cool, but you obviously had AI build this and thus anyone else that wants this can have AI build it for them too very quickly. As such there’s really no value in what you’re trying to sell here.” It was cold, but accurate feedback they needed to hear.

jillesvangurp

We're in the software industry. The whole point of that industry is automating things that are very repetitive. Frontend projects are very repetitive. And now AI is doing that for us. Fantastic, fees up a lot of time to build more interesting things. De-skilling for skills that just aren't that relevant anymore because we've solved the problem (with AI or otherwise) has been a constant in our industry ever since computers were invented. Move on, learn new skills. And actually effective use of AI is a skill some people seem to be struggling with. Stuff still doesn't build itself. If you can prompt it right, you can get it done. But are you prompting right? Are the tools doing what you ask them to do? How do you know? Did you check? I seem to spend an awful lot of time prompting AIs. I'm definitely getting better at it. But it's still a full time job. And I'm sure in a decade or so we'll look back on this as a very inefficient way to build software. The tools will get better. The AIs more autonomous, etc. Because if you spend a day doing repetitive things prompting the same things over and over again, somebody or something should probably automate that!

williebeek

My previous employer fired all front-end developers a few years ago, we went back from tons of frameworks (Vue/jQuery/Ruby/Nextjs) to simple HTML and CSS. Turns out dedicated front-end developers aren't really needed, at least not where I was employed.

dwa3592

I have a slightly different take on deskilling argument. I don't think AI is going to deskill. Someone who has spent 10 years working in any field before AI is not going to get lose too much. Yesterday I sat down to solve a medium hackerrank problem without any assistance (code complete, AI etc) and it took me 10-15 minutes to get into that mode but i was able to do it comfortably just like how i used to do it pre-chatgpt. AI might unskill the younger workforce which will enter the field, aka they will never learn the way we did.

docheinestages

You talk about deskilling. But are these skills even relevant to the ultimate goal of producing a web page according to the design specification? Should we have been worried about the "deskilling" that happened when we transitioned from punch cards to high level languages?