It really is wild to have seen this happen over the last year. The days of traditional "design-to-code" FE work are completely over. I haven't written a line of HTML/CSS in months. If you are still doing this stuff by hand, you need to adapt fast. In conjunction with an agentic coding IDE and a few MCP tools, weeks worth of UI work are now done in hours to a higher level of quality and consistency with practically zero effort.
If it's zero effort, then why do devs need to adapt fast? And wouldn't adapting be incredibly easy?
The only disadvantage to not using these tools would be that your current output is slower. As soon as your employer asks for more or you're looking for a new job, you can just turn on AI and be as fast as everyone who already uses it.
Yup, I see comments like the parent all of the time and they are always a head scratcher. They would be far more rational (and a bit desperate) if they were trying to sell something, but they never appear to be.
Always "10x"/"100x" more productive with AI, "you will miss out if you don't adopt now"! Build a great company 100x faster and every rational actor in the market will notice, believe you and be begging to adopt your ways of working (and you will become filthy rich as a nice kicker).
>"Why are we paying you $150k/yr to middleman a chatbot?"
Because I don't get paid $150k/yr to write HTML and CSS. I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems. And "chatbots" are a very useful new tool to aid in that.
> I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems.
That's true of all SWEs who write HTML and CSS, and it's the reason I don't think there's much downside for devs to not proactively start using these agentic tools.
If it truly turns weeks of work into hours as you say, then my managers will start asking me to use them, and I will use them. I won't be at a disadvantage compared to people who started using them a bit earlier than me.
If I am looking for a new job and find an employer that wants people to use agentic tools, then I will tell the hiring manager that I will use those tools. Again, no disadvantage.
Being outdated as a tech employee puts you at a disadvantage to the extent that there is a difficult-to-cross gap. If you are working in COBOL and the market demands Rust engineers, then you need a significant amount of learning/experience to catch up.
But a major pitch of AI tools is that it is not difficult to cross the gap. You draw on your domain experience to describe what you want, and it gives it to you. When it makes a mistake, you draw on your domain experience to tweak or fix things as needed.
Maybe someday there will be a gap. Maybe people will develop years of experience and intuition using particular AI tools that makes them much more attractive than somebody without this experience. But the tools are churning so quickly (Claude Code and Cursor are brand new, tools from 18 months ago are obsolete, newer and better tools are surely coming soon) that this seems far off.
i'm surprised by no line of css html in months. maybe it's an exageration and that's okay.
However, just today i was building a website for fun with gemini and had to manually fix some issues with css that he struggled with. as it often happens, trying to let it repair the damage only made it go into a pit of despair (for me). i fixed the issues in about a glance and 5 minutes. This is not to say it's bad, but sometimes it still makes absurd mistakes and can't find a way to solve them
>"just today i was building a website for fun with gemini and had to manually fix some issues with css that he struggled with."
Tailwind (with utility classes) is the real key here. It provides a semantic layer over CSS that allows the LLM to reason about how things will actually look. Night and day difference from using stylesheets with custom classes.
I have pretty good luck with AI assistants with CSS and with theming React components like MUI where you have to figure out what to put in an sx or a theme. Sure beats looking through 50 standards documents (fortunately not a lot of "document A invalidates document B" in that pile) or digging through wrong answers where ignoramuses hold court on StackOverflow.
> are now done in hours to a higher level of quality
However, I feel that there is a big difference between the models. In my tests, using Cursor, Clause 3.7 Sonnet has a much more refined "aesthetic sense" than other models. Many times I ask "make it more beautiful" and it manages to improve, where other models just can't understand it.
Elaborate, because I have serious doubts about this.
If we're talking about just slapping on tailwind+component-library(e.g. shadcn-ui, material), then that's just one step-above using no-code solutions. Which, yes, that works well. But if someone didn't need customized logic, then it was always possible to just hop on fiverr or use some very simple template-based tools to accomplish this.
If we're talking more advanced logic, understanding aesthetics, etc. Then I'd say it's much worse than other coding areas like backend, because they work on a visual and ux level beyond just code which is just text manipulation (and what llms excel at). In other words, I think the results are still very shallow beyond first impressions.
Pull down designs via Framelink, optionally enrich with PNG exports of nodes added as image uploads to the prompt, write out the components, test/verify via Playwright MCP.
Gemini has a 1M context size now, so this applies to large mature codebases as well as greenfield. The key thing here is the coding agent being really clever about maintaining its' context; you don't need to fit an entire codebase into a single prompt in the same way that you don't need to fit the entire codebase into your head to make a change, you just need enough context on the structure and form to maintain the correct patterns.
>The designs itself are still done by humans, I presume?
Indeed, in fact design has become the bottleneck now. Figma has really dropped the ball here WRT building out AI assisted (not driven) tooling for designers.
I find they achieve acceptable, but not polished levels of work.
I'm not even a designer, but I care about the consistency of UI design and whether the overall experience is well-organized, aligned properly, things are placed in a logical flow for the user, and so on.
While I'm pro-AI tooling and use it heavily, and these models usually provide a good starting point, I can't imagine shipping the slop without writing/editing a line of HTML for anything that's interaction-heavy.
It really is wild to have seen this happen over the last year. The days of traditional "design-to-code" FE work are completely over. I haven't written a line of HTML/CSS in months. If you are still doing this stuff by hand, you need to adapt fast. In conjunction with an agentic coding IDE and a few MCP tools, weeks worth of UI work are now done in hours to a higher level of quality and consistency with practically zero effort.