Comment by n_ary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by n_ary | Hacker News Reader

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> Steer away from skills like web development that are clearly getting eaten by LLMs

On the contrary, here in my corner of EU nearly 60% of new jobs are frontend or full stack.

Anything else left is mostly SAP consultant or DevOps.

I think, the whole WebDev is dead end is just false lies to dissuade new entrants. Literally most successful business with a digital solution is web stuff with some automation that would otherwise be ms excel sheets shared via email.

Also this whole panic over LLM is overblown, I know of some brilliant experienced people in other professions like Electronics, Mechatronics, Aerospace, Material Science and literally all of them are finding the job market “very difficult at the moment”. It is the bad global mood in general used deceptively by opportunists to spread false fears of their LLM/AI.

At the end of the day, an insurance seller has hundreds of concerning reasons to convince you why everything is dangerous around you and you really need their product. Now apply that to AI sellers.

Web element feel similar to PHP or wordpress development in 2010.

There are millions of small businesses that demand wordpress websites, but the barrier to entry to support and build systems got very low very quickly. Professional developers were competing with high school students and offshore devs for work.

As a backend Developer, I can now build websites easily with Claude and react. I think web development, especially front end, will be like knowing HTML and CSS in 2015. Like everyone should know it, and thus not even worth putting on your resume.

Genuine question: why do you think LLMs will be able to handle frontend development in a way they won’t be able to handle backend development? I assume you’re talking about real companies, not toy projects or websites for restaurants or whatever.

Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not).

With backend I find they're good at the really high level (give me the options for architecture and their pros and cons) and doing something small and precise (gimme a function `List (Maybe a) -> List a`). The stuff in-between I have to handle myself.

> Well, "frontend development" means a million different things, but LLMs are very good at flexbox and grid (and I'm not).

This is my #1 complaint about how people talk about LLM productivity

If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it

LLMs are good enough to solve my problems with flexbox. I gave a LLM a small self-contained flexbox-puzzle which I couldn't solve, and it solved it. The CSS it produced did the thing I asked.

> If you aren't good at something you are not qualified to say that LLMs are good at it

Hard disagree: Even if you aren't good at writing a function like `List (Maybe a) -> List a`, you can easily say whether the LLM suggestion was good or not.

If you aren't good at playing the game of go and a program beats you giving you nine handicap stones, probably the program is good at it. Many similar examples.

I think the person above was alluding to the idea that the determination of whether or not LLMs are good at frontend development is the idea that frontend development is flexbox. That's like me saying "LLMs will replace all developers who work with databases because Claude was able to spit out a really complex SQL query."

> If you aren't good at playing the game of go and a program beats you giving you nine handicap stones, probably the program is good at it. Many similar examples

This doesn't follow at all, maybe you just really suck.

It is entirely possible that a game AI that you find impossible to beat is trivial to beat for almost anyone with more experience than you have

Yes, there are chess engines that can beat the best chess players

However, most people couldn't possibly tell the difference between playing against the best chess engine in the world or a novice difficulty chess AI, because most people suck at chess

"It is better than I am" is a terrible metric to use to judge when you suck at that thing

Developing, managing, and operating distributed systems infrastructure has way less training data available than webdev. And it doesn’t translate in to pithy interpreted language one-liners.

Frontend (IMHO) tends to be simpler than BE systems, because FE is literally a single device, and often a single git repo.

BE requires a lot more context around microservices, database, reverse-proxy, api-design, etc.

A signal that makes me correct is the number of BE vs FE at a big company.

lol I wish. The problem is not the inherent complexity but the accidental complexity. FE has a big chunk in the second. You won’t get your budget to rewrite three accidental complexity you find in the wild

The question isn't "is frontend simpler than backend?" (which I don't think is as simple as you make it out to be). The question is "can LLMs replace frontend developers?"

I think it's a bit like Squarespace. The lowest possible tiers of developers will be replaced. Anything complex enough to be beyond the scope of a hobbyist isn't able to be replaced with an LLM.

There's another factor here I forgot to mention - web development, as a specialization, tends to be paid less and has a lower career ceiling in many companies than backend and infra engineering. This is a personal observation on my part but I've seen many other people remark on this. True full stack engineering, I think, is reasonably safe from the robots at the moment.

If someone likes building products, I'd basically recommend that they not go 100% full-bore on frontend engineering, definitely go for "full-stack", and accept that a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days. I would also recommend that they develop solid product management and UX skills.

Certainly. Front-end and UX skills go together. Front-end dev as a beginner → UX → PM later, would provide the same salary as back-end dev -> DevOps / K8s.

> a lot of frontend code is trivia that you can just ask the LLM for these days

If you're building CRUD yes. If you're doing anything remotely complex or novel, LLMs fall apart, much like they do for complex backend tasks. There's a lot of cool, highly customized stuff you can build with JS, and LLMs don't do a very good job at general problem solving.

They're still helpful for writing small, specific functions, or providing high level guidance

Anecdotally, I work on backend/cloud and my senior frontend engineers do earn not as much as I do, but close… and their environments are always less stressful (major outages are not caused by frontends usually and when so, reverting to the last stable commit is enough since frontends are stateless; their toolset is narrower than mine, so yeah they need to jump between frontend frameworks but that’s fine… me in the meantime need to jump between backend frameworks, dbs, k8s, distributed system knowledge, unix tooling, OS/TCP/IP, etc)

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