Front-End Engineering is Dead, Long Live Front-End Composability
Traditional front-end engineering (hand-coding pages from Figma designs) is being replaced by composability—designing primitives, schemas, and contracts that let AI, PMs, and designers ship dynamic interfaces without reinventing the wheel.
Core Argument
The era of front-end engineers hand-implementing pages is ending. AI coding assistants, schema-driven UIs, and component systems like Shadcn are collapsing that work into something cheap and repeatable. What replaces it is composability: designing the primitives, schemas, and contracts that let entire organizations ship new interfaces.
Key Mental Model Shifts
- From data schemas → screens: Think about the mutability profile of your UI schema—the allowable range of views across different data queries, not just shepherding one view into production.
- From pixel-perfect → brand promises: Work with designers to ensure the brand system is expressed reliably across hundreds of dynamically composed pages.
- From design patterns → workflows: Think in recipes. Enable as many good workflows as possible based on your data in brand-compliant ways.
- RBAC reimagined: The front-end should no longer decide what users can or cannot do. You need role security and auditability baked into a composable platform—assuming both agentic and human users.
- AI as consumer: Agents will be 99% of the attention on your tool. Think about API consumption, computer use agents, permission inheritance, and how to deliver your brand promise headlessly.
The New Front-End Engineer Role
- System designer, not ticket taker: Choose and shape primitives; define acceptable button variant ranges; design the vocabulary of your interface
- Workflow modeler: Drive dynamic flows, tables, and forms by extending schemas rather than hand-coding pages
- AI integration architect: Set guardrails for where AI can generate UIs and where it can't; ensure brand-appropriate generation
- UX instincts at scale: Care about layout thrashing, input latency during generation, keyboard accessibility across a thousand variants, and inherent predictability
Where Classical Front-End Survives
- High-polish consumer products: Custom rendering, intricate interactions, careful performance tuning
- High-traffic mission-critical surfaces: Every line needs human review; bespoke attention to error states, semantics, keyboard flows
- Regulated/safety-critical domains: Healthcare, finance—auditability must be built in from day one
Notable Quote
"We're moving to a world where the whole org should be able to write that code."
Connections
Relates to 12-factor-agents—both discuss designing systems for AI agents as first-class consumers, not just human users. Factor 11 (trigger from anywhere) and Factor 7 (contact humans with tool calls) align with the composability vision of enabling agentic and human users to interact with the same underlying system.