>But in general, frontend code is a lot more ephemeral and replaceable than other types of code.
Tell that to Digg.
If you slop oit a front-end, your users will leave. It's that simple. The front-end is the part the users use the most, nobody cares how "elegant" your APIs are, or what kind of database the system uses. The front-end matters to users, a lot.
I've seen AI take a perfectly good front-end and slop out a piece of crap that will make the users leave in droves. And when nobody raises their hand (or in my case, everyone else is in the grip of AI psychosis) then bad times are ahead.
Yep. I don't know why this is so hard for teams to understand: if the part your customers pay you to interact with (the UI/UX) doesn't fucking work, your customers are going to leave.
We need to kill this two-party-system-brain crap and siloing front end and back end. Learn both. It isn't difficult. It allows you to design much better systems that avoid complexity and unreliability.
I honestly think specializing in front or back end is a good thing. Sure, it does help to know both, but there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it. I'm full-stack leaning towards front-end, and working on a personal project I know where the back-end is lacking. The front-end is pretty great but not as great as it could be if I could focus all my skill only on front-end.
> there's too much ground to cover for any one person to do well at all of it.
If I can do it, others can do it, too. I even built an entire full-stack framework (w/ a custom components system + Node.js back-end), deployment system, database, and CSS framework (and now those all run my businesses). When I started, I didn't have the slightest clue beyond some basic HTML and CSS. I think people limit themselves too much trying to fit into the narrow containers of a job title/description. I get why, but it's worth asking yourself what else you're capable of beyond your job if you're eager to learn.
Just because someone can code front-end doesn't mean they can design good UX. One of the "full-stack" devs I work with who started as a back-end dev thinks rewriting a full WYSIWYG front-end system is fine to replace with a series of unstyled input boxes. He's pretty clueless about what our users want. He's asking me to explain to him why his solution is worse, when it should be extremely obvious. While he can code front-end, he doesn't really "get it" at all.
The Web has always been a bunch of things: complicated backends that just need something in the frontend to operate, flashy marketing sites that don't do much behind the scenes but build brand credibility, cheap-to-free sites that people cobble together just to get something out there. Some are "web sites", some are "web apps".
For some of these cases, frontend is probably dead. For some, either the robots aren't quite able to have the level of originality and fidelity people are after yet, or the robots will enable more people to do better frontend work.
And like you're saying, it has to "feel" good/right. That can be a hard thing to prompt!
That only works if viable alternatives exist, the moats aren’t too large and users have the freedom to switch. For example, Reddit was a viable alternative to Digg at the time, Facebook was a viable alternative to MySpace. Enterprise software has some truly grotesque UI but the user doesn’t have the freedom to switch and the moats are enormous.
Tell that to Digg.
If you slop oit a front-end, your users will leave. It's that simple. The front-end is the part the users use the most, nobody cares how "elegant" your APIs are, or what kind of database the system uses. The front-end matters to users, a lot.
I've seen AI take a perfectly good front-end and slop out a piece of crap that will make the users leave in droves. And when nobody raises their hand (or in my case, everyone else is in the grip of AI psychosis) then bad times are ahead.