Will AI replace the front-end Developer?

We talk a lot about how AI will be replacing a lot of manual labor and processes by intelligently automating scenarios - just like how the printing press replaced a lot of calligraphists in the 1400s. But will AI take the next step and transform what we think is highly complex - things that only humans could handle?

Well, that is what I and my colleague Chirag recently presented in Fidelity's "Tech Connect" forum. This forum is a place where tech enthusiasts can show the others some interesting new ideas or prototypes.

Originally our main purpose was to somehow make sense of putting two relatively distant terms such as AI and Front-end development together. We just thought what is the possibility of a merger in these two vastly different topics - and like any other educated men - we googled for stuff. And to our surprise, we found a lot many articles and MIND IT - a few prototypes. Hence we decided to share our knowledge through a 9 hour workshop.

Here is a pic of the fun times we had

We incorporated the learnings we got from the workshop we conducted because even we were just exploring the field and the attendees from our workshop also shared some creative insights.

So basically there were two parts to our workshop and presentation:

• How AI can help in frontend development
• Will AI replace the front end dev

In the first part, we went over technologies such as Tensorflow.js - where the developer can run, re-train and create AI models on the front end itself.

I like Tensorflow and using it in the front end alone makes it even more interesting. Because instead of running an AI model on our server, we can use the client's ever-growing power in the form of flagship phones and good laptops, hence reducing the load on the server to make AI usage more mainstream. We went on about a few good pre-trained models that Tensorflow already provides:

• https://medium.com/tensorflow/tagged/bodypix
• https://medium.com/tensorflow/text-classification-using-tensorflow-js-an-example-of-detecting-offensive-language-in-browser-e2b94e3565ce

Now coming to the title question. Will AI replace the front-end developer?

To answer this question, have a look at this article: https://blog.floydhub.com/turning-design-mockups-into-code-with-deep-learning/

The article above covers most of what we did in the second part, so why re-write!

It's my opinion that we would probably not replace the frontend developer with AI, but probably be more of a helping hand to them. Especially with models like pix2code, we can easily at least create HTML code so that the dev can focus on animations and scripts. But what if even that can be replaced with AI one day? Let's find out!

Big shout out to the Innovation Garage and Sambhav at Fidelity that helps incubate most of our experiments. Thanks to the comms teams for making the event possible! And mainly my colleague - turned best friend - Chirag Chhillar who is always working on something new and is kind enough to let me be a part of it.

P.S. We at the Innovation Garage are working on our own experiments around this tech :) Stay tuned.