It really feels as though my 20 year career as a front end developer is coming to a very abrupt end; at least as I have know it these past two decades.
same tbh but i feel like we're still required, maybe not in the same numbers as before, and our job description has just changed. it feels more akin to an "AI Agent Operator" or something similar.
i'm still pretty confident someone like my mom wouldn't be able to do my job even with the same access to all the latest LLMs, so we're still providing some value, just in a very different way. whether the market will reprice the cost of our labor, we will see
If software development were getting easier, first thing I'd expect to see would be a strong downward trend in salaries. Why pay a high mid+ dev rate when a junior+LLM can do the same?
That's yet to happen. 90% of software dev skills are still relevant - AI is, for now, just a productivity boost.
We have been heavily using agentic coding in my place, and what is emerging is people who used to be tech leads or architects are now back to producing code, and what would require 5-10 people now starts as a 1-2 person project. Some of those have already gone live, successfully, so there will be more of that.
Between juniors with LLMs and seniors who don't like AI, I'd hire the junior, but I think the trend in 2026 will be to hire senior people who enjoy producing code with LLMs.
Producing code is an interesting word because obviously they're not typing code anymore. That's where I've landed.
I'm somewhere between 10-60x more productive than I used to be. My day cycles between 3-6 different projects, bug fixes, development cycles. Each one them going ten times faster than I could on my own.
We don't even consider bringing on vendors or saas anymore. We only look at our existing vendors and think about getting rid of them.
There is a rift though. Some teams are still just "playing with it". Our offshore workers who haven't seemed to increase their velocity at all. In the next couple of years there's going to be a pretty big wrecking. Those that are agentic and those who are not.
I always ask myself if I'm still bringing value. But then I look at what I'm talking to the computer about. And the amount of different tech stacks algorithms. Tricky business logic isn't something that you can just pick somebody off the street and do.
For now there is value. Only today Opus 5 suggested a really bad but totally workable approach to an edge problem. It would work by putting a lot of undue stress on infra. People would add infra. A simple pushback reduced a O(n) to a O(1) solution - and that was my value added. I bump into those things regularly.
I think the labs want to address the clueless dev market - hence the "proactivity" in Fable. But it will be a difficult thing to balance.
It does matter, but how long do you think it takes to get right? It's a follow up prompt or a few tweaks by hand. I also have an /a11y skill for it that's tailored to exactly the things it sometimes doesn't get right first time round. Further, while it may not one-shot that stuff every time, with a little setup and the right AGENTS/CLAUDE md - it's usually not far off.
Another thing that helps is pointing it to patterns in an existing codebase (e.g. "use the box-link pattern for cards, as shown in [..]").
EDIT: The point being that even if they make mistakes that are easy to spot and fix _now_, you'd have to assume that in the very near future those kinks will be ironed out - I mean, the capabilities are only going in one direction.
In 20 years of my career I haven't seen humans generate correct a11y. When prompted and given quality reference (e.g. UK gov design system) LLMs can nowadays beat 19 out of 20 web devs.
Thanks out can also hook it to Playwright with Axe and let it run assessments.
