[ThereIsNoWorry]

Frontend seems to involve visual design, which backend obviously doesn't (usually). Other than that, I don't see the difference, as soon as you're working on things more complex than simple static pages. Both will gradually become more efficiently done through smart use of AI tech.

But replacement? ChatGPT and GPT4 can't solve real world problems without heavy time investment of an engineer to prompt-engineer a semi-usable (if lucky) solution that still needs a lot of debugging (so coding yourself is still way faster for sufficiently complex things) and adjustment to your codebase.

Will people get left behind that don't adapt? For sure. That's always the case. If productivity is significantly increased with use of such AI tools, then those that won't use it due to whatever reason, including incompetence, will be let go eventually. All others will be fine, as always. This fear-mongering is actually good for us that can adapt, makes us more valuable.

Let's talk in 2030 again. Then in 2035. Then in 2040. And so on until we have AGI that generates you a new revenue stream just by reading the thoughts of a non-technical middle-manager, by which time we will probably have completely different problems.

People afraid of AI automating things just don't know how it works. I mean, no one does really, but if you went to University and studied AI, statistics, machine learning, deep learning and some of the variations then you'd know that that shit isn't intelligent or magic.

It predicts the most likely next tokens + some randomness based on what's in the training data. It can't do more than that. That it can conjure up well known algorithms and some variations of them that help solve some specific problems that "look complex" is not a surprise, but alas, a mostly useless party trick that scares some people apparently.

[Arainach]

There are a variety of differences.

Frontend development involves a large number of fuzzy human bits that are constantly moving underneath you. Yes, your backend dependencies can change and you may need to update an API version, but in frontend you have browsers, screen readers, frameworks, and all sorts of massive icebergs largely outside of your control constantly moving.

In the backend, you probably have a language that is fairly stable. Write some unit tests, write some integration tests, but things are predictable and mockable.

Writing UI (properly) requires testing against several versions of several browsers, each with their own rendering quirks. UI tests - screenshots, whatever - are inherently flakier and when something breaks it's harder to know for sure if it's your fault.

You need to test against a variety of screen readers and accessibility tools. None of them are well documents, all of them parse the DOM (or native accessibility stack if you're not doing a web app) in a slightly different way, and the standards are constantly changing. As a bonus, you're legally obligated to get it "right", not that anyone can tell you precisely what "right" is.

Visual design isn't a walk in the park either. The designers will tell you to use color X. Its contrast ratio against colors Y, Z, and B on various pages will hopefully meet the contrast ratios, but then someone will point out that in exactly one of Windows' four different high contrast schemes this ends up being black on black and you will stare into a dark Lovecraftian abyss wondering what hellish algorithms Microsoft uses to pick colors. You'll fix HC Black and break HC white, you'll fix white and break black #2, and you will eventually throw your computer into the Marianas trench and go repair bicycles for a living.

[ratorx]

These are valid differences, but none of them seem particularly challenging to an AI, assuming some equivalence between image and text recognition. To a human, sure because it is more difficult to formally specify. Arguably an AI could benefit from the fuzziness because the set of acceptable outputs is larger.

And I’d also say that the argument is a bit straw man-y because it considers (some of) the complexities of frontend, with a fairly ideal view of the backend. Once you bring concurrency, scale and state, backend can become fairly Lovecraftian as well.

[ThereIsNoWorry]

Brilliant, sounds even less automatable than what I assumed.

[fatnoah]

> Frontend seems to involve visual design, which backend obviously doesn't (usually). Other than that, I don't see the difference

My thought, from a long career or full-stack development, is that front-end is very much about how people interact with things. It's more a matter of doing a thing with strong attention to the details of the display, interactions, and behaviors in different environments.

Back-end development is more about how machines interact with each other. Things are more deterministic, but instead of scrutinizing minutae of human-machine interaction, I'm thinking about how a machine will do this hundreds or thousands of times per second.