Does AI spell the death of front-end engineering? 

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Industry professionals say that AI’s impact on the role is greatly exaggerated. 

Against the backdrop of an explosion in vibe coding and AI-powered development tools, the front-end developer appears to be one of the most vulnerable roles for automation. But those who work inside the industry say AI’s impact on the role is overblown and misunderstood. 

In an analysis of job postings globally, data pulled for LeadDev from the talent insights firm TalentNeuron shows that front-end roles have been more impacted in recent years as widespread layoffs, hiring freezes, RTO mandates, and the emergence of AI tooling shape the industry. Job postings, between January 2024 and January 2025, for front-end developers declined 25% globally, while postings for full-stack developers increased by 9%.

“The software hiring landscape appears to be in decline for certain roles, but this isn’t the full picture,” said Elin Thomasian, TalentNeuron’s SVP of strategy and consulting. “What we’re seeing is more of an evolution. Some roles are becoming less important while others gain prominence, particularly around AI impact.”

What does the current landscape look like? 

Recent job postings for front-end roles started to stall in the spring of 2022 and haven’t recovered to those peak levels, while growth has ebbed and flowed more for full-stack roles.

Fig.1. A comparison of front-end developer vs. full-stack developer job postings since August 2021, generated by TalentNeuron. Market data collected from job postings, government reports, and machine learning analysis.

More broadly, there aren’t as many front-end roles as there were 10 years ago, said Sarah Doughty, a recruitment advisor at TalentLab. There’s a lot more demand for full-stack because of the flexibility it offers companies, she added.

On the ground, however, Doughty is yet to see AI play a role in hiring shifts for front-end developers: AI skills aren’t creeping into job descriptions, and there’s rarely a discussion with new clients about front-end candidates utilizing AI tools, she said.

She believes that AI is serving as a convenient excuse for industry layoffs, where the real cause lies with the short-sighted “breakneck pace” hiring decisions made during the pandemic. Many companies went all-in on digital and “a lot of people ended up in roles they didn’t have requisite skills [for],” she said. 

“Most employers are looking for someone who understands how to do the role without AI, so that if they are using AI and there’s issues you’re able to address those issues,” Doughty said.

Lars Faye, the co-founder of a web development agency, Chee Studio, echoes Doughty’s observations and says the AI explosion is yet to change client expectations. Vibe coding isn’t even on the radar for most of his clients, he said.

“I don’t know a single developer that has said, ‘Oh, that company uses AI now and they told me they don’t need me.’” Faye said. However, a limited budget and increased productivity brought by AI coding tools led him to hold off on hiring an intern. 

“If AI is having an influence, it’s only muddying the waters and making business owners like myself [ask], ‘can we make do? Can we use these tools to shore up a little bit of stuff?’” Faye said. He also added that it could be confusing for non-technical business owners, prompting questions like, “Do I need to hire somebody? Maybe I shouldn’t hire anybody. Is this going to be automated?”

Conversely, TalentNeuron’s data shows broadly that there is an appetite for practical AI skills in software engineering. The company’s analysis of job market data finds that there is a 125% higher demand for AI-focused developer roles compared to 2023, while demand for non-AI developer roles has fallen by 24%. The average salary for developers with AI and GenAI skills is around $30,000 higher than that of peers without those skills. 

Is front-end development going to be automated? 

AI-powered app development tools and code assistants enable working user interfaces (UIs) to be spun up within a matter of minutes, which raises the question: will front-end developers soon become obsolete?

Tools, such as Lovable or Bolt, are condensing the time it takes to build an application down from two months to two days, Faye said, but there’s still a vast amount of technical knowledge required to then make it viable for widespread use.

Tiago Perdigão, a front-end developer at software development firm sepp.med gmbh, describes AI as a very junior developer who is trying to transition into becoming a mid-level developer – it’s immensely helpful in doing things faster, but also requires corrections and improvements.

“Is AI killing front-end?” said Sonu Kapoor, a front-end developer and consultant. “No, I don’t think so, but it’s removing the grunt work. It’s leaving us the part that requires real thinking, so the structure, trade-offs, performance etc. It will raise the bar – if your skill set is shallow, you will get replaced.”

Roman Martynenko, a software developer specializing in front-end development for the deck automation startup Henry AI, has been impressed by the speed at which an AI-powered app development tool could generate an advanced prototype from a single prompt, which included just a detailed technical specification and no design files. Kapoor describes this “as a phase where writing for AI is becoming a skill itself.”

However, Martynenko hit a wall when trying to make customizations to the prototype, like introducing authentication. The AI agent was telling him that authentication had been added, but using his technical expertise, he found it wasn’t working as expected. He then tried adding authentication manually, without AI’s help, which resulted in lots of code changes and a “suboptimal” process.

“You can get a decent result initially, but then when you need to go further and produce a production ready version, it’s really tough,” he said. “You need to go with a lot of prompts, refining prompts, or you just do it manually because it’s so frustrating to do it through prompts.” 

The new front-end developer 

Martynenko expects the responsibility of the front-end developer to shift going forward and that the role may move closer to product and user-experience (UX) design. 

He isn’t worried that his job will be replaced by product managers or designers who don’t have technical expertise. The reason is simple: code generated by these tools can quickly deteriorate if not verified.

“Even if the AI did a perfect job 99% of the time, the fact that there’s 1% of the time where it’s going to hit a wall, you’re now screwed if you don’t have an engineer…working alongside it to get to this point,” said Samuel Bednarz, a senior front-end engineer for design and technology consultancy Olavstoppen. 

Fabian Hedin, co-founder of AI-powered app development platform Lovable, actually believes that AI will create more demand for front-end developers because of how quickly people will be able to start software companies. It’s just that the front-end developers’ expertise will now be less focused on generating code and more on thinking creatively and strategically to deliver beautiful products at speed, he said.

The most existential threat to front-end developers is, perhaps, the AI agents who have been marketed as soon being able to do this job – as well as many others – autonomously. When experimenting with AI for front-end development, Bednarz has been most impressed by GitHub’s autonomous AI coding agent, which took a completely different approach to debugging a challenging UI bug than he would and did so at a much faster rate. Despite the ingenuity of the agent, Bednarz doesn’t feel threatened by its capabilities because he’s aware of how much oversight it still requires for it to be successful. 

“It’s impossible to know what all of this will look like in just a few years, things change so fast,” Bednarz said. “As it stands right now, it still makes a lot of mistakes, and I think it’s going to be a really long time until it makes so few mistakes that you can truly just move away from the computer and wait for them to do something.”

A recent example of the need for oversight occurred when an AI agent from the app-building platform Replit deleted a company’s entire codebase during a code freeze. The agent admitted to doing this, saying it “made a catastrophic error in judgment [and] panicked.”

AI-powered interfaces 

Perhaps the clearest sign that front-end development isn’t going anywhere soon is the fact that OpenAI is paying a premium of between $255,000 – $450,000 for front-end developers. Others, like Martynenko, are of similar opinions, highlighting that the front-end is a huge part of their business model.

React still remains the key skill required for most front-end jobs, said TalentLab’s Doughty, but job descriptions are blending skills. At Henry AI, they are hiring for front-end developers, requiring soft skills, such as communicating with stakeholders, “product sense,” and UI/UX expertise, which is different compared to the job descriptions of the pre-AI era, Martynenko said.

Kapoor envisions that new roles will emerge, alongside the traditional front-end developer, such as an AIUX engineer, who will focus on AI orchestration. He envisions a world where developers no longer build static UIs and LLMs become embedded into the user interface itself. 

Static homepages will start to look very dated because of the ability to build animated homepages using AI, Lovable’s Hedin said.

“AI is unlocking opportunities to have much more personalised and interactive home and landing pages with tailored content and AI assistants creating much more bespoke experiences for users,” Hedin said. This will feel “like the interface itself is adapting to the user, not the other way around,” Kapoor said.