AI Wants to Kill the Frontend Developer. It Won’t Work.
September 18, 2025
Every few years, someone declares my job dead.
First it was Flash. Then it was Dreamweaver. Then it was “anyone can drag-and-drop a Wix site.”
Now it’s AI.
The headlines practically write themselves: AI makes frontend engineers obsolete. The end of coding as we know it. Software that writes itself.
And just like every other “frontend killer,” it’s being oversold.
Source: AI Wants to Kill the Frontend Developer. It Won’t Work. | HackerNoon
For almost the entire time I have had anything to do with computers (which is quite a few decades now), people have been suggesting that the end of software development is just around the corner.
Whether it is what we used to call fourth-generation languages, whether it’s low-code or no-code solutions, or now AI, there’s always something that was going to do what software engineers do any day now better and cheaper.
So far, that hasn’t worked out, but it doesn’t mean just because something hasn’t happened so far, it won’t ever happen. What is the likelihood that large language models will get rid of our jobs, particularly in front-end?
Dan Odell has some well-thought-through ideas here that I think are well worth contemplating.
I think there’s little doubt that not only will software engineering, including front-end development, change—it already is significantly. So if we want to continue to stay relevant, these are the sorts of things we should definitely be thinking about.
