AI Chatbots on the Verge of Destroying Frontend UI — You Won’t Believe What Happens Next

I did not believe that the AI Chatbot, which has been making headlines since the beginning of this year as a software engineer, would dramatically change our behavior. Or even I couldn’t imagine that it would affect the demand for my frontend development skills. This is because frontend UI will no longer be necessary.

Is this a story about the distant future? No, I don’t think so.

I have been working as a mobile app developer since around 2010 when smartphones were just starting to become popular. Compared to the era of feature phones, the emergence of app stores and app development environments allowed more developers to easily enter the business. As you all know, the emergence of many new apps has completely changed our behavior patterns. Existing businesses desperately focused on app development and adopting a mobile-first approach to avoid losing their market share. Why did that happen?

I believe it was because people realized that mobile devices were more convenient as an interface for accessing services than desktop computers. As a result, mobile apps and the mobile web took market share away from the desktop web. And the same kind of transition is about to happen to every User Interface we currently have for the sake of AI chatbots rising.

From a human perspective, user interfaces are tools for checking and updating data. What if the same thing could be done even more easily with chatbots? Although it’s still in the early stages, I believe that ChatGPT plugins are the first step to making that possible. Because this enables reading data from and executing actions on other services without needing frontend UI. Indeed, headless services can function effectively without relying on traditional frontend UIs. While there may still be cases where having a supplementary UI is beneficial, I believe that ultimately, it will be replaced by AI services that parse and interpret the information.

So what happens to frontend engineers? For services that are not related to business or personal use cases, a UI may still be necessary. Even in that case, as evident from the popularity of frameworks like Next.js and Tailwind CSS, the need for designing UIs from scratch is diminishing. The role of frontend engineers is shifting more towards integrating data into standardized UI components, and they will likely delve deeper into the realm of backend development. Ultimately, I believe that the boundary between the backend and frontend will blur and eventually disappear.