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  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.
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  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.
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  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.
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  lqet
  This is something that recently also crossed my mind. I haven't really done frontend developing for at least 10 years know, but I am already old enough to remember the time in the late 2000s when suddenly everyone stopped developing web GUIs by hand and used frameworks, and anyone still writing HTML, CSS, JS and database queries by hand was ridiculed. Job offers suddenly stopped asking for PHP / HTML / CSS / SQL / JS skills and demanded Ruby on Rails and Django and Spring and GWT, later Angular skills.It really feels strangely familiar to me: you could get very far very quickly without any real deeper knowledge and have a working web application within a few minutes. It felt like magic. Then you could customize it within the framework by skimming documentation and googling around until... you couldn't, because you had no clue how any of this really worked internally. And just like with vibe-coded web apps, you could recognize the standard framework web app that was patched together in an afternoon from a mile away, but it very much impressed managers.Amusingly, I sometimes find that developers talk about their go-to frontier model in the same way that GUI developers talked about their favorite web framework ~15-20 years ago. Personification of the tool, even identification with it, frustration that things that worked with version X got worse with version X.1, "I am developing things 10x faster now", "I am going back to writing XYZ by hand", etc.
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  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!
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  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.
• CM30
  Isn't a lot of this complexity going away for good reason? Browser compatibility was only an issue because browsers didn't stick to the standards closely enough. It's something that's not supposed to be noticeable at all.And let's be honest, one of the best changes front-end development has seen is how previously complex problems now have built in, easy to use solutions. Yeah you could say it was harder to code layouts when flexbox and grid didn't exist and you had to deal with floated elements and absolute positioning, but the new setup is just better for everyone.Customising select menus used to require lots of CSS and JavaScript to remake the element. Now browsers are implementing features to let you customise default select boxes the same way. Having an element expand to auto height use to involve JavaScript. Now it's something you can do in CSS alone. Creating modals used to involve writing CSS and JavaScript. Now an accessible and efficient version can be done with built in tech.Meanwhile JavaScript frameworks are really just continuing the pattern started by previous tools, like WYSIWYG editors, Content Management Systems, jQuery, etc.At the end of the day, any tech that gets more advanced will lower the skill floor and reduce the need to care about those minor intricacies. Most people don't need a particularly advanced solution to their problems, so whatever system can automate away most of the work will get used for that. It's not unique to web development or software engineering.
• 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?
• PaulHoule
  Sometimes I think the techniques we used to build complex user interfaces in HTML without AJAX or DOM manipulation back in the early 2000s are effectively lost, like the techniques used to build the pyramids: insofar as younger full-stack developers have been "deskilled" many of them think you need Javascript to, say, validate forms.Once you are using AJAX and manipulating the DOM the complexity of asynchronous communication is going to lead to something of a similar magnitude as React. Sure you can write document.title="A new title" and not have to bring in <Helmet> but even if you think of front end as "just" updating the UI when data comes in from the server a complex application may need to update several bits of the UI and at some point you need to create some kind of communication or state management bus that handles that. Could it have been done differently? Sure.If there's something wrong with the Reactisphere it isn't that it creates an abstraction which other abstractions live on, but these are leaky abstractions. You could use something like Bootstrap or MUI without understanding CSS if you are making something very simple and don't care what it looks like (don't have a marketing team who cares what it looks like!) but to do pro-level work you can put in front of customers you have to understand HTML, CS, JS and all the the frameworks used in your project.
• estetlinus
  > Just like artisans and craftsmen that were replaced by assembly line workers more than a century agoDo you really need to go that far back for a comparison? We no longer need human computers to perform tedious calculations, or typists to draft and distribute correspondence.The simplification of frontend development was never a final state. It has always been continuously evolving through abstraction and automation.
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  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 daySVG+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
• toyetic
  I'm not entirely convinced the framework comparison holds.In the case of frameworks ( and higher level programming languages ) you are operating at a new layer of abstraction with the specific intent to hide the lower level, that's the whole point of the framework.LLM's don't actually move the abstraction layer. You're still coding in react/python/whatever high level language. Yes you can generate the code using natural language but you still need to understand what's being generated, verify its correctness, and reason about the system it fits into. LLMs don't hide anything they produce the code you otherwise would've written and hand it to you to review.
• pull_my_finger
  I don't think we should blame the LLMs, frameworks and the libraries necessarily. In my own experience, it feels like the real problem is a lot of companies (especially start ups) like to talk about "rapid prototyping", but are quite keen to just keep the prototype as the final product. Bootstrap, Rails, Tailwind, Nextjs and now LLM generated code... great for getting something up quickly with a semi-polished look to demo a thing. The real problem is that we're selling prototypes as products.
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  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.
• foo-bar-baz529
  I just vibe code the html and css. I review the JS, but I figure if the flow of data is correct, I can just verify the html/css code through manual testing
• rglover
  > Just like AI is deskilling programming now, JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade.Not to be rude but this person doesn't understand the fundamentals of the topic they're discussing.Frameworks just give patterns and abstractions to build a front-end, but you still have to actually know how to use those things to build a UI. You still have to know HTML, CSS, and JS (assuming you want to do it well, not just slap some junk together). Even with AI, unless you're comfortable shipping a half-working UI, just like programming: sorry dude, you still need to know your shit.
• dmarinus
  I don't agree that you don't have to know CSS/HTML when you use a frontend framework.I guess some frontend frameworks can abstract it away but most don't and you almost certainly will run into the limitations of those frameworks and then you still need to understand HTML/CSS
• anon
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  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 testingI 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.
• 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.
• ai_slop_hater
  > Just like AI is deskilling programming now, 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.What does he mean by this? What skills were lost? Writing HTML templates?
• 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.”
• 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.
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  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.
• ptx
  The article compares LLMs to Stack Overflow and calls it "a continuation of the same trend", but I think there's a big difference.With Stack Overflow, you got multiple answers from different people with different viewpoints and different approaches, each consistent within itself. You could figure out where the author of each answer was coming from and judge whether they seemed to know what they were talking about. You could weigh the trade-offs and merits of the different answers against each other.With LLMs, you get a single mushy pile of slop, not grounded in any person's actual experience or judgement. It might pretend to offer different perspectives, but it can't really, so it's much harder to evaluate.
• Sharlin
  > A lot of programmers may not know this, but 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 testingAs someone who didn’t really know that being a front-end dev putatively doesn’t involve thinking about those things anymore, I think that list conflates a couple of different things.Things like the differences between browsers and CSS/HTML quirks, needed to wrangle a document markup language into creating user interfaces, are accidental complexity caused by particular path dependencies, and if they can be abstracted out, that’s a great thing.Accessibility, interface design, performance, and other things related to user experience, on the other hand? Those are mostly orthogonal. A UI framework can raise (or in some cases lower) the bottom in the sense of facilitating reuse of (hopefully well-designed) components, but no framework is going to make your UI accessible or well designed by itself.In the fabled past, frontend development didn’t require you to be highly qualified in these matters – web UIs were simply terrible, mostly. High skill level was not required because nobody expected anything from web UIs beyond the barest core functionality.There was UI programming before the web [citation needed]. In a sense it was "deskilled" because you used a "framework" aka the OS windowing and widget libraries rather than drawing rectangles manually (except in some special cases like games where very custom UI is desired – but those custom controls invariably have roughly 0% of the UX affordances provided by standard ones). Back then, Visual Basic and other RAD tools (anyone still remember that acronym?) were front line of "deskilling", but honestly WYSIWYG visual design is still one of the best ways to create UIs, it’s just rarely done these days for various reasons.
• dude250711
  Abusing a document mark up language and a scripting language to make "UI" is not a treasure of a skill. We can move on.
• olooney
  > undeterministic abstractionI've seen people argue that LLMs will just add another layer to the top of the compiler stack: instead of writing code, we'll use English, and run it through a pipeline: English -> Rust -> ASM -> Machine Code What's one more layer, right?But what the author says about agents being "undeterministic abstraction" shows why that will never work.Compilers rely on a concept called observational equivalence[1] to define when two programs are basically the same; this allows them to make changes under the hood like unrolling a loop or targeting another machine. Now, it turns out we know a lot about how and how not to do this, thanks to a logician named Frege who worked out exactly which properties a "definition" would need to have to count as a definition without becoming an axiom. In particular, that it should be "eliminable" and "conservative"[2]. In plain language, that a formal definition should always be able to be eliminated by rote string substitution, and that it shouldn't smuggle in any extra assumptions. When we talk about things like syntactic sugar[3] or hygienic macros[4], we are basically applying Frege's two conditions to programming languages.LLMs are neither. They cannot reliably or provably go from the prompts they are given to the source code they generate, and they make a ton of implicit assumptions when they do so. There can never be any equivalence between two "prompts" in the same way that two programs can be equivalent modulo some level of abstraction. The whole process of starting from prompts is wildly nondeterministic, which is why the only pattern that works is to generate the code, review it, and test it, and then check it in and use that as the starting point for the next prompt.Which is not to say that LLMs aren't useful for code generation; they clearly are. But they don't provide an abstraction that lets us get away from the details of actual code, and thanks to Frege we can understand why they never will.I can say all this with such confidence because I did once write a wild little Python library that used a bunch of introspection to actually do this[5]. And it absolutely did not work in practice beyond toy examples.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_equivalence[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/#ProDef[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienic_macro[5]: https://github.com/olooney/fourth_gen
• emodendroket
  I mean, maybe it was a "lost decade" from the perspective of frontend developers, but I can't say I'm nostalgic for an age where everyone is handrolling everything from legacy browser support to responsive designs and I'm hoping they have a good understanding of all these things because the average page would be much worse than it is with everyone using these libraries.
• Rover222
  I'm allegedly a fullstack dev, often working on fullstack features, but I haven't had to think deeply about much on the frontend all year. 90% of my thought/work goes into backend work. The AIs just handle the FE stuff easily based on our existing patterns. Not saying it's perfect or can't be improved, but it pretty much always "just works" perfectly well enough.
• 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...
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  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.
• 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.
• panny
  >writing all code by handThis is now officially a pet peeve of mine. I don't write code "by hand" I write code "by brain." A craftsman who does something "by hand" actually needs manual skills to produce that carved wood thing. Even if you know what you want and know what it looks like, you need skill with your hands to make it happen.Software is not like this. I don't need typing skill, the IDE autocompletes most of it for me. I think about what I want and it becomes reality. If you were using a bare text editor and typing out getters and setters your whole career, sorry, you were just doing it wrong. No wonder you love AI.
• barnabee
  Front end is mostly an enshittified disaster hiding behind "UX" and "design principles".If LLMs help me never use a front end owned/dictated by a corporation again it'll be no bad thing, regardless of the quality of the code they write.
• 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.
• Npovview
  if you value intelligence (and likely income from that intelligence) above all other human qualities, you're gonna have a bad time. -Ilya.
• 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.
• standardUser
  Honestly I think what is missing is not developers but designers. Or, I should say, designers hired to create competent designs that serve people well and not to instead manipulate users. If you want better front ends - get more and better designers! As for front-end code, I don't expect to ever write a line of that again in my life.
• mock-possum
  Opening with this claim of ‘Front end’s Lost Decade’ then not explaining what that is is infuriating to me, a front end developer - which decade was this supposed to be? How/Why was it ‘lost?’ How did I miss it?
• Devasta
  People don't use web tech because they care about quality, they target it very specifically because its one of the places where quality doesn't matter. If your native app crashes, your users will curse your name. Webpage or Electron slop freezes? They'll shrug and restart.This idea that quality ever existed on the web is ahistorical at best.
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  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-handI'm sorry but that simply does not make any sense. How is increasing the breadth of your skills leading to a deskilling?
• js4ever
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• euejcidnf
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• volume_tech
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