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by JimDabell 12 days ago
Most organisations need a high quality design system and to be able to assemble pages from it. Totally bespoke design will start with the designer using an agent. So the way I see it, the everyday stuff will be the first to go, followed by designers taking the rest of it. Front-end developers have their area eroded from the bottom then the top.

As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.
1 comments
nec4b 12 days ago
The frontend feedback is much harder for AI. AI needs to be able to see the page with all the moving parts and sounds and have a bit of sense for the layout and taste in colors etc. I think it much harder for AI to recognize what feels good for the human user. Backend is devoid of that personal touch. By definition you are building for the machine. You have APIs, databases and infrastructure which is logical and easy for LLM to interact with. "All it needs" is curl and it can run in a loop the whole day improving backend software.
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JimDabell 11 days ago
I think you’re conflating development and design there. I’m saying that development is at risk, I’m not commenting on design. Taste in colours and things like that are design.
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nec4b 11 days ago
I'm not. I really fail to see where do you see frontend development to be easier for AI to pick up compared to backend. As I said frontend is writing code for an user interface and backend for a machine interface.
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JimDabell 11 days ago
You think “taste in colours” is a development task not a design task‽
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nec4b 11 days ago
Knowing that a white font is not visible on white background is not really a design job is it? Calling an API on the other hand requires mostly logic and documentation or do you disagree?
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JimDabell 10 days ago
Forget AI exists for a moment. You’ve got a team of humans working on a project. You’ve got a backend developer, a frontend developer, a DBA, a platform engineer, a graphic designer, a UX person, a product manager, and a QA person.

Whose responsibility is it to select the colours? You think this is the responsibility of one of the developers‽ You don’t think “having taste in colours” is solidly owned by the designer‽ You think this is a developer task not a design task‽

Aside from that, the specific example you chose is an area where we have deterministic algorithms for judging contrast – we don’t even need AI for that, regular old procedural code can do it.

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