No, you are spending less time on fixing little things, so you have more time on things like making sure all the potential errors are checked.

Not a problem! Just ask the AI to verify its output and make test cases!

nah, you rely on your coworkers to review your slop!

Code you never ship doesn't have bugs by definition, but never shipping is usually a worse state to be in.

Your UIs are likely still ass. Pre-made websites/designs were always a thing, in fact, it's (at least to me) common to just copy the design of another place as "inspiration". When you have 0 knowledge of design everything looks the greatest, it's something you kind of have to get a feel for.

Frontend engineers do more than just churning out code. Still have to do proper tests using Cypress/Playwright, deal with performance, a11y/accessibility, component tests, if any, deal with front end observability (more complex than backend, out of virtue of different clients and conditions the code is run on), deal with dependencies (in large places it's all in-house libraries or there's private repos to maintain), deal with CI/CD, etc, I'm probably missing more.

Twcs layoffs were due to AI cannibalizing their business model by reducing traffic to the site.

And what makes you think the backend is safe? As if churning out endpoints and services or whatever gospel by some thought leader would make it harder for an AI to do. The frontend has one core benefit, it's pretty varied, and it's an ever moving field, mostly due to changes in browsers, also due to the "JS culture". Code from 5 years ago is outdated, but Spring code from 5 years ago is still valid.

One of the more ignorant comments I’ve read on HN.

It's difficult for me to make a good evaluation on this comment.

With the AI writing the UI are you still getting the feedback loop so that the UI informs your backend design and your backend design informs the UI design? I think if you don't have that feedback loop then you're becoming worse of a backend designer. A good backend still needs to be front end focused. I mean you don't just optimize the routines that your profiler says, you prioritize routines that are used the most. You design routines that make things easier for people based on how they're using the front end. And so on.

But how I read your comment is that there's no feedback loop here and given my experience with LLMs they're just going to do exactly what you tell it to. Hamfisting a solution. I mean if you need a mockup design or just a shitty version then yeah, that's probably fine. But I also don't see how that is 20x since you could probably just "copy-paste from stack overflow", and I'd only wager a LLM is really giving you up to 2x there. But if you're designing something actual people (customers) are going to use, then it sounds like you're very likely making bad interfaces and slowing down development. But it is really difficult to determine which is happening here.

I mean yeah, there's a lot of dumb coders everywhere and it's not a secret that coding bootcamps focus on front ends but I think you're over generalizing here.

Other people are dumping on you, but I think you're getting at where the real 20x speedup exists. People who are 'senior' in one type of programming may be 'junior' in other areas -- LLMs can and do bridge those gaps for folks trying to work outside their expertise. This effect is real.

If you're an expert in a field, LLMs might just provide a 2-3x speedup as boilerplate generators.

Also the terrible code bases and orgs that are out there… the amount of churn bad JavaScript solutions with eight frontend frameworks might necessitate and how tight systems code works are very different.