Mauro Bieg on May 23, 2026 What AI is doing to the jobs of programmers feels very familiar to a lot of us frontend developers – because it has happened to us before. Let’s first look at the transformation of the frontend and agentic coding through the lens of deskilling , and then look at both changes through the lens of a higher level of abstraction . Finally, we’ll look at previous changes, like the advent of copy-pasta from Stack Overflow, and how the Bauhaus movement reacted to rising industrialization. Deskilling Just like AI is deskilling programming now, JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand. And no need to take my word for it! I’m not the first to say so . Alex Russell called it Frontend’s Lost Decade . What is deskilling?…