Wes Bos: How Developers Stand Out When AI Writes the Code

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Wes Bos (0:30)

Fable just came out. You say hi and it's nine bucks to say hi. 200 bucks a day. I know people that are going 10 times harder than that.

Patrick Akil (0:38)

This is Wes Bos, icon in the front-end community, and with everyone coding through their agents nowadays, we discuss how you can stand out today.

Wes Bos (0:47)

The code doesn't speak for your ability anymore. You need another way to show that you actually know what you're doing.

Patrick Akil (0:54)

How have you seen education change?

Wes Bos (0:56)

What does software engineering look when the money runs out?

Patrick Akil (1:02)

I heard a similar take last year about generative UI, and it's only going to be chat or one-chat interface. What has actually changed throughout the year?

Wes Bos (1:14)

The models have gotten significantly better for understanding your intent.

The models have gotten way better in terms of taking in context.

That's the one thing, should you have a dashboard that you decide on, or should that dashboard be populated with content and the design of that dashboard be generated based on the context that it knows about you? You know, I often talk about, like, the smart home. My smart home knows everything about me, like when my cameras have gone off, when my lights are turned on and off, and like what should be the interface for my smart home? Should it be some... I should say a lot of it should just be automatic. There should be no interface, or some of it should be voice. But then like other parts is like I want like an app or like a dashboard or like an iPad or something on my wall. But like I don't want to have to spend like forever designing the perfect dashboard for my like home assistant. I want it to just shift and like I want to make a dashboard for me based on what it knows. It has all of the context. You know, AI is fantastic at deciding what to do given the context. So the next step in that is just like generating the UI or generating the dashboard for me.

Patrick Akil (2:28)

And it will do that based on the context or it will do that based on your interaction with it?

Wes Bos (2:34)

That's what I'm like trying to figure out. Is like, is it good enough to like build your own UI?

Or like the other thing is that people say like, you don't need to build a website anymore. The user will just decide what it wants to see. And like, the question is like, is the user smart enough to make a better dashboard than the people who know the product and design it? Or is the LLM better at building this product than you are? And in some cases, yeah, it's great. And other cases, no, you see some of these shitty websites that get cranked out and it's just not a good experience. Or like, you still need user interface designers to understand how people use a product.

Patrick Akil (3:16)

Yeah. I don't think users, I think to a certain degree, they know what they want.

But then the people that are specialized and research and actually go in deep, they know way better, is my feeling.

Wes Bos (3:25)

I think that's why this middle ground of generative UI, meaning that you can give it a whole bunch of components, but you should still be able to tweak it a little bit to what you want. Because you see a lot of people just like vibe coding their own versions of an app because they've been frustrated with this tool they use every day for so long. Now they finally made something that they want. And I think that's great that people can just make their own version of something that makes them happy and does exactly what they want and not what their 20,000 customers need.

Patrick Akil (3:57)

Yeah, everyone can become a builder now. So if I have a specific problem, I build a product for me and only for me. And then I solve my use case and otherwise.

Wes Bos (4:05)

That's all you need. Yeah.

Patrick Akil (4:07)