And now the part for my fellow frontend engineers.

We spent years — YEARS — perfecting pixel-perfect hover states. Debating whether border-radius should be 8px or 12px. Fighting about padding values. Losing sleep over that one animation that stutters on Safari.

And now the primary visitor to our websites might not have eyes.

Your beautiful gradient? A bot doesn’t care. That buttery 60fps scroll animation you spent two days on? Completely wasted on a crawler. The great light mode vs dark mode debate? An API call has no preference.

I’m joking. Mostly.

The reality is this doesn’t kill what we do — it splits it. There’s still the human-facing layer and it still matters a lot. People need to trust what they see, understand what they’re doing, enjoy the experience. That’s not going anywhere.

But now there’s a second layer that matters just as much — the machine-facing one. Structured data. Semantic markup. Clean APIs. Agent-friendly auth.

The frontend engineers who do well in the next few years won’t just build interfaces for people. They’ll build for people AND their AI assistants at the same time.

Or to put it differently — you’re not losing users. You’re gaining a second audience. One that doesn’t care about your font choices at all but has very strong opinions about your data structure.

The internet was built for humans to read. It’s becoming a place where machines read it on behalf of humans.

That’s not a bad thing. It might even be the thing that closes the digital divide — if someone in rural Nigeria can tell their phone “find me the cheapest laptop with these specs” and an agent does the rest, they don’t need to know how to navigate Amazon’s UI. They don’t even need a laptop.

Or it could widen the divide further. That part is up to us.

75 years → 46 → 38 → 26 → 7 → 2 months.

The curve only goes one direction.

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This text was written with the help of my favourite AI model.