Is the Front End Dying?

Recently, beginning developers, and not only those who work on the front end, have been very worried about AI and the effect it might have on their careers.

AI seems like a new phobia to add to the rest: website builders on which you can make a website without involving a developer, “no-code,” and many more advances that might make it seem jobs in software development are on their way out.

At first glance, these fears might seem well-grounded. After all, non-developers can sit down with a chatbot and put together a small independent project quite quickly. Almost anyone can create a simple project — for example, a blog or a business card website — without too much trouble.

Complex Projects

However, creating a complex project to suit one’s business requirements is not so easy. And what happens when it becomes necessary to make changes or finalize the project? Also, due to lack of knowledge, many beginners do not understand how money is made in this area and what customers pay for.

I have concerns and don’t think it’s right to start learning front-end from the basics (HTML/CSS/JS), thinking that it’s a waste of time. Starting with popular frameworks can complicate their assimilation and understanding of this area, personal experience.

New frameworks and updates are constantly released, thereby adding to the confusion among newcomers. Before you have time to learn one thing, it’s time to learn something new…

But after soberly weighing and thinking about everything, I realized the work of a web developer will not go anywhere, and the profession will not simply disappear.

A Constant Demand

There is always a demand for improvement and acceleration of current projects, as well as their support. There has always been a concern that web developers, and even more so front-end developers, will become redundant due to some new technology. In the 2000s, it was WordPress. By the 2010s, it was Webflow. In the early 2020s, it was “no-code” tools. At the moment, it’s AI.

However, artificial intelligence is not a magic wand that will perfectly implement all your ideas. It’s a very powerful tool, but it’s only as good as the data used to train it. There are tons of code snippets on the Internet, and they are often very general. At the same time, each codebase is unique. There are very few large and good open source codebases.

We are still a long way from big tech companies firing their developers and replacing them with chatbot operators. It seems to me that there are many potentially unsolvable problems that prevent this from becoming a reality. I think the most likely scenario is that tools like GPT will be integrated into developer tools and used to extend what an experienced developer can do.

The front end is not outdated and there are no prerequisites that it will suddenly be supplanted by new technologies. I consider a good developer to be one who continues developing and adapting to market requirements.

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