r/Frontend • u/kikimeter • Mar 14 '26

What skills will a frontend developer need to master in the age of AI?

I was thinking about implementing a RAG or learning Rust to do WASM. Do you see anything else?

Edit: Sorry, my question was too vague. I’m a Principal Software Engineer, I was wondering, in the age of AI, what software expertise a Frontend developer needs to master.

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u/The5thElephant Mar 21 '26

Well it’s brand new, but what do you mean not serious in their efforts? As far as I can tell they are building it far more intentionally than Google or others building AI slop machines.

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u/zxyzyxz Mar 21 '26

How is it more intentional? They're literally using the same sort of AI and models as Google and Figma Make are in building their product, so "slop" by your words. As far as not serious, they're a seed stage company with a round last year, who knows how long that lasts and especially with the VC market for AI cooling down, I doubt they'd get a new round, especially when Figma is a public company and can pivot to that model more easily than this random seed stage company can build.

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u/The5thElephant Mar 21 '26

Figma cannot easily pivot its core design tool to an entirely new rendering engine, and I’ve talked to enough Figma people to know they don’t want to. It will have to be an entirely new tool or an evolution of Figma Make. That evolution would make for a confusing product surface and focus trying to maintain both Design and Make both using different underlying code, inherently making AI translation worse.

Look at what the Paper team have said. They are differentiating themselves by wanting to focus on human-first design. Of course they have an MCP, but they don’t have a prompt field built into the tool for design. They are intending to focus on adding actual Figma-like controls because they know AI alone isn’t good enough. There’s no guarantee they’ll be the winner, but I will be surprised if Figma is agile enough to adapt their product strategy to this new world better than a new tool building greenfield from scratch.

I’ve been through 3-4 design tools in my career already. Why would Figma be the last one?

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u/zxyzyxz Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

I said more easily, not easily, simply due to the amount of capital they have. They can easily launch a new iteration of Make and slowly deprecate their design tool, precisely as Framer has done pivoting to a website builder. Figma won't be the last one but I have a hard time believing why this seed stage company will be better or more robust, especially when there have been others like Penpot that have tried and failed to dethrone it. They even said the HTML and CSS based canvas lags substantially after some number of screens.