If you are doing web development as a career, there really is no future for those software developers and it does not matter the rank given that AI has reached senior staff-level for typical web apps.
Sam Altman already outlined that this year AI agents will reach the level of a base-line senior software engineer on most tasks including web development such as HTML, CSS and Javascript and those web apps can be built in minutes.
One can even say by their own definition of "AGI", it is actually "AGI" for web developers today.
Eh, they are all hoping to make it big and bank out their paper money. As long as they are still bankrolled by the VCs, it won't change. Although the engagement of Softbank is a solid historic indicator they could eventually go bust :)
While I strongly agree that frontend development roles will definitely be in less demand, especially for those devs who decided long ago make a hard cut after whatever comes beyond the browser/client code, as those tasks were always fairly trivial...Sam Altman also said that "we know how to build the AGI" some time ago. Meanwhile, we are in what, year 4 or 5 of the hype and ~year 20 of the ML LLM models? Fighting it out with the AI-fied web search which will ocassionally give us a wrong or just dangerous recommendation. Or generate a picture of a person with 6 fingers, etc. This is not AGI and never will be. A 6-year old kid would know you dont make pizza with glue and stone, so I'd say even the frontend devs are somewhat safe here.
Frontend development is time consuming and difficult because it's often inherently stateful, there is typically a tension between aesthetic and functional dimensions and you're interfacing with people, who are unpredictable and varied.
From my perspective most UIs suck in the sense that they almost always can be better in some way or another.
Anything that helps speeding up feedback loops in this space will be extremely welcome. It will enable developers to push for higher quality and make room for innovation.
Sam Altman already outlined that this year AI agents will reach the level of a base-line senior software engineer on most tasks including web development such as HTML, CSS and Javascript and those web apps can be built in minutes.
One can even say by their own definition of "AGI", it is actually "AGI" for web developers today.