…I Wasn’t Searching for AI

Funny enough — I didn’t sit down in 2025 and say “I’m going to embrace AI tools now.” I was just working through a bug, when a colleague casually mentioned a new AI autocomplete in our code editor. I shrugged, accepted a suggestion, and moved on. But that one tiny suggestion stuck. Before I knew it, I started glancing at class names and prop structures differently: faster, but also… more aware.

I realized I was no longer coding with only my brain and fingers. The environment around me — the editor, the snippets, the AI hovering in the background — had become part of the process. And with that shift, frontend development started to feel a bit more like conversation. Like I was collaborating with a silent partner that occasionally nudged me out of trivial mistakes or redundant code.

How Your Workflow Changes When Code Completes Itself

Suddenly, boilerplate felt optional. That repetitive “div > div > section > article” dance? Often replaced with a neat component scaffold before I even typed. CSS module imports, prop-types/stubs, accessibility labels, even default states — some of it just appeared. And once you’ve tasted simplicity, going back feels like manually driving a horse.

But with power comes responsibility. I still review everything. I don’t blindly trust the AI. Sometimes it guesses wrong — wrong semantics, wrong aria attributes, wrong edge-case logic. I find myself double-checking, not because I distrust, but because I care. As in: “Is this UI really going to behave the way I expect — keyboard navigation, responsive layouts, light/dark mode, weird Edge bug someone might hit?”

Tools? Oh yeah — But the Mindset Matters More

There are so many tools now: AI-powered code editors, component libraries that generate props, design-to-code pipelines, auto-formatters, smart linting, automated accessibility hints. Sometimes I catch myself thinking: “Am I writing code or curating suggestions?” That moment matters. Because whichever one I pick, I remember there’s a human on the other end — a user, maybe with visual impairments, maybe on a low-power phone in a cafe somewhere.

If you only rely on tools, you risk illusions: “It works on my machine,” or “No red warnings from lint.” Tools can be helpful, but they don’t replace empathy. They don’t replace understanding how a screen reader might interpret your markup, or how a slow mobile network might load your JS. They don’t replace remembering that someone else — maybe someone very different from you — will actually use what you build.

Nothing Groundbreaking — Just… A Little More Human

I don’t call myself an “AI-first frontend dev.” I’m not even claiming to be “future-proof.” I’m just a developer who’s a little extra cautious, a little more human than I was a year ago. My code feels less like a strictly typed contract and more like a conversation — between me, the machine, and the eventual user.

And that’s not a bad thing. Because in the end, the best UI isn’t the one with the neatest TypeScript types or the cleverest component graph. It’s the one that works. For everyone. Even when AI gives you shortcuts, it’s remembering the human on the other side of the screen that matters most.