Web Development in the Age of AI

The future of frontend development in the age of AI & AGI
Artificial intelligence has made heretofore unfathomable gains in capability, utility, and popularity since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. The impressive capabilities are usurped only by the speed at which they are evolving and improving. So what does this mean for frontend development -- or for engineering itself? These are fascinating questions to explore -- with a potential for a paradigmatic shift the likes of which we haven't seen since the Industrial Revolution or the dawn of the World Wide Web. Join us as we discuss these ideas and more with Sean Grove & Swyx -- who will help us to contextualize these changes with insight and even some demonstrations of the technologies & concepts discussed.
About Sean Grove
Sean Grove is a seasoned tech leader and software engineer who's passionate about innovation and making complex problems simple. With a strong background in programming languages like Rust, Clojure, and OCaml, Sean is uniquely positioned to bridge cutting-edge technology with real-world solutions. He has even founded two Y-Combinator startups and sold OneGraph to Netlify in 2021, where he now serves as Principal Architect. Recently, Sean has ventured into the world of machine learning, working on projects like Journaliza, Prator, and Prof Dumbot. These projects aim to help developers and users leverage AI to enhance productivity and communication, and he's firmly in the camp that this is only the beginning of how ML will impact daily life and developer tooling. His passion for exploring new frontiers in this exciting and rapidly evolving field is contagious, and he's always eager to push the limits of what's possible with technology.
About Shawn Swyx Wang
Wwyx has helped Developer Tools cross the chasm at AWS, Two Sigma, and three devtool unicorns - Netlify, Temporal, and most recently at Airbyte. He has started and run communities for hundreds of thousands of developers, like Svelte Society, /r/reactjs, and the React TypeScript Cheatsheet. His blog (swyx.io/ideas) covers Tech, Careers, and Indie Hacking, and his nontechnical writing was published in the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developers. He's currently writing and podcasting on AI at latent.space
Recorded live in San Francisco at Reactathon 2023. Learn more at reactathon.com

[@palyanytsia]

I express my gratitude for the discussion and admiration of the guests.
Despite the fact that their thoughts differ on many issues, it seemed to me that both of them are AI optimists.
But I would like to hear the opinion of an AI pessimist as well.
For example, what's gonna happen with beginner level jobs? Who barely mastered React or Photoshop recently. They don't live in San Francisco, they don't have the title "principal architect".
Telegraph operators are often cited as an example, most of whom have retrained as telephone operators. But now there is no such luxury: professions disappear faster than new ones appear, and the speed of people's learning is not unlimited. And what will happen in 5-10 years, when millions or tens of millions of people will be left without work, because one person + AI will be able to replace today's dozen?

[@benjamindunphy8844]

Organizer here. Those conversations are happening, but it's not the right conversation at a technical conference (at least this one). Engineers are implementers, and we're excited about the technologies and want to understand how to use them. There will certainly be regulation, societal norms, best practices for business, and perhaps a fundamental shift in work that live upstream from the domain of engineering. This was a discussion and not a talk because this is a brand new domain for this audience in particular (mostly frontend engineers) and we wanted to highlight for them what these technologies are capable of on an introductory technical level.
I'll be organizing a new conference for AI Engineers that dives deeper into these subjects so watch for that. The implications you speak of can be mitigated with open education for engineers to learn, adopt, & evolve. Engineers of today no longer code with punchcards -- and the engineers of tomorrow may no longer code with VS Code and JavaScript.
But I hear you -- as I mentioned on the panel I think the main issue is the velocity at which these technologies are advancing. But I think as our human brains come around to understanding it, and we break out of old established patterns of engineering, we can be a bit more optimistic about the situation as it is less alien and more of "yet another tool" to be used. I think that engineers who today fear this tech will soon grow to love it as it will enable them to move faster and be more productive than they ever dreamed.