Here is an exciting video by DesignCourse that my mentor/friend shared with me today. Most companies and people nowadays always talk about the power and potential of AI, like ChatGPT. Some people even discuss the idea of replacing many jobs, and while I believe that both sides of the coin, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the topic that this video brings up. In this video, the developer showcases three different mock-ups, with each mock-up scaling in detail and difficulty. Long story short, the AI wasn’t able to complete even remotely close to what was being asked, especially when it came to the styling. Now I know what you may be thinking: well, it’s settled then, AI wouldn’t be able to replace frontend developers. While I do agree with that statement, my reasoning is much different. I believe eventually, AI will be in a great spot to actually be able to create the pages with full styling and logic, but I see a need for developers regardless. I work at a job where pages/emails aren’t always built with raw code. However, the knowledge a developer brings to be able to debug and leverage tools, I think, won’t really be replaceable in the near future. We aren’t really paid for writing coding; we are paid to fix problems/problem solve and provide insight. That’s not to discount the ability to write good, clean code, but I think just about anyone can learn to write code. But not everyone can do the harder stuff. My mentor agreed with what I said and responded, “AI can spit out a lot of really disturbingly bad code, and it’s going to be a mess to maintain for a while until the tech gets better. Even then, there’s a lot more developers will need to understand to jump into generated code. More than any marketing or business rep is going to want to ever touch.” So, while I would agree that AI is powerful and useful, I don’t see it replacing frontend developers anytime soon.

Let me know if these kinds of videos are something you want to see more of; if not, comment on this post and tell me what you want to see. Make sure to subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss the next post, which could be something that changes the way you view code! Until next time!

– Eric Terlop