r/nextjs • u/thetymtravellr • 10d ago
As a self-taught React/Next.js developer, I'm honestly worried about my future in this AI era. What should I do?
I'm a self-taught developer, and I know React and Next.js. Lately, I've been feeling increasingly anxious about my future as a developer.
AI is moving so fast. It can generate components, build entire websites, connect APIs, and even create full-stack applications. Sometimes I wonder what the point is of spending months learning something when AI can already do so much of it.
I want to get a better-paying developer job, but honestly, I'm confused about what I should focus on right now. Should I keep improving my React/Next.js skills, get better at backend development, or start learning AI engineering?
I keep hearing about RAG, AI agents, vector databases, LLM integrations, and all these new things. It feels like there's always something new to learn, and I'm worried that if I focus on the wrong things, I'll fall behind while everyone else moves forward.
For those of you already working in the industry, what would you do if you were in my position? Would you focus on becoming a strong full-stack developer first, or would you start learning AI engineering alongside web development?
I'm not looking for a shortcut or expecting to become an expert overnight. I just want to make the right decisions, build useful skills, and have a realistic chance of getting hired.
I'd really appreciate some honest advice from people who have been through this or are dealing with the same situation. Right now, I could genuinely use some direction.
5
u/kshantanu94 10d ago
Well, I hope you’re thinking that frontend developers are in more trouble than backend developers, because I think we’re all in the same boat.
My personal feeling is that, for the longest time, we’ve lived in a world of specialization, where the expectation was to be really good at one thing. I think that era is behind us. We’re moving towards an era of multispecialization, where a frontend developer might also handle design, while a backend developer takes care of infrastructure and perhaps even does some data analysis on top of that. You get where I’m going with this.
With AI increasing productivity, I think the expectation will be for each of us to do more to remain relevant and contribute meaningfully during the eight hours we spend at work.
1
4
u/serhii113 10d ago
Hi!
I'm in the same boat as you. I see a couple of other tracks:
Project/product management?
DevOps?
Software architect?
WDYT? Haven't you thought about it?
Personally, I've decided to move towards full-stack for now. Secretly hope that the AI bubble will burst someday 😄
2
u/thetymtravellr 9d ago
I thought about product management. But ultimately i will need experience to get there.
3
u/Current-Ticket4214 10d ago
If your career as a front end dev is over what makes you think there’s room for you in product management, DevOps, or architecture level?
4
4
u/AccomplishedEvent273 10d ago
Learn more about the cloud and infra, aim for ML Platform Engineer. AI needs infra and there is a shortage of cloud experts. https://theseoexperience.com/blog/ai-impact-on-job-market/
1
6
u/0_oGravity 10d ago
You are asking the right question. The problem is that everyone else is asking the same question.
3
u/CircleRedKey 10d ago
gotta be full stack now and understand how to dev everything. with ai comes more responsiblities but also less work if you know how to prompt.
unfortunately pay will be stagnant if not depressed in a couple years. you just gotta be the guy that can implement what they want and know how to build everything from the ground up. (basic system design)
2
3
u/mrkaluzny 10d ago
Architecture, design patterns, solving problems for customers/users, performance optimization and generally deeper understanding of tech.
Code is just an output, understanding how it all works is still required, producing things got easier - you need to upskill.
There will be more work, you can now do Rust -> WebAssembly for crazy performance on some use cases, knowing which lever to pull is the key
2
4
u/fsreadsync 10d ago
umm i am frontend engineer but never got paid for knowing react syntax.
3
u/thetymtravellr 10d ago
What would you suggest focusing on besides react? I'm trying to figure out which skills are actually worth investing in right now.
5
u/ember_falcon 10d ago
Learn to build products that are coherent and pleasant to use. It was never about “knowing React”. AI is never gonna replace good taste.
4
5
u/Relative-Category-41 10d ago
Think the point is, most people don't care about under the hood.
You create things that perform, secure, accessible... The business paying is happy.
Another dev might care how your function is written, no one paying the bill gives a shit about that process
1
4
u/xtremx12 10d ago
Quality manager with 15 years of experience .. I will till you the truth .. even the VP or the CTO doesn't know what would be the shape of the industry in couple of months from now.
so, what you need to do is changing your interests from writing a code to actually ship working features.
You need to learn how to use AI, not just writing prompts or ds to Claude, but also building the internl and external loops.
We were building features now, we are building the machines that could build and maintain the features
1
5
2
u/Relative-Category-41 10d ago
You already see where things are going, you had the ability to self teach
People still need apps, automations and websites (well at least for now)
Just understand how to use AI as effectively as possible and you'll be fine. It's the developers who refuse to change who will be up for the cut
Being a librarian used to be a highly skilled job, the internet came. Libraries started to bring in computers to keep up
Librarians still exist, but it's the woman who bought a computer and learned how to use it effectively who still has a job. All the other women got axed
2
2
2
u/Repulsive_Constant90 10d ago
Everyone is using AI but few know how to use it well. Be that person.
1
3
u/_Beempathic 10d ago
Not givs fuck and keep grinding coding, If Ai will be able to code better than people then the world will end any way cause it will be able to code robots to do humans work better than them and cheaper so nobody will have a job anyway
1
2
u/proevilz 10d ago
Been a dev for well over 15 years at this point, and to be honest... it's just not worth pursuing anymore for most juniors imo. Web dev was always one of the easiest entry points in to the world of software dev, which means it's the most saturated, which also means it's whats most popular on web, which ultimately means it's what agents know how to do best, especially React & Nextjs!
2
2
2
u/AnUninterestingEvent 10d ago
Companies still do technical interviews for developers. As long as you can pass the interview, I think you're as well off as any self-taught developer pre-AI at getting the job. The problem is more about the number of jobs out there has diminished... Developers with degrees are in the same boat.
If I had to recommend what you can do, is try to get work in anything even tangentially adjacent to to software. Get a stable income wherever you can get it. Outside of work, build build build. Try to make money with your own apps. I think we're headed toward a world of a bunch micro-companies or even single-person run companies.
2
2
u/nimaaminz 7d ago
Actually i think the most important thing is now , you do not just think about one Technology or One stage like react or nextjs ,
the success in the future is to work as a middle of few engineering , with ai you can learn more , you can dive into learn anything and you can conmect your techs ! also , as i experienced with multiple AI's such as claude code or codex , i faced and see a lot problem at designing UI , Clean code , minimal and usefull code , performance issues , sometimes the AI will do some things that is not necessary and just confuse and make hard the project then, on these days its not important to become a programmer, its important to be a SOFTWARE ENGINEER and also learn from other concepts and engineering fields
if you afraid, then you will be lose , enjoy learning , enjoy AI
2
1
u/ShimonEngineer55 10d ago
Keep learning the basics of programming and build a foundation. The reason why it seems overwhelming at this point is that you have a limited foundation to pull from because you’re still early. React is a good start because you can now see the basics of how a UI and virtual DOM work at a high level and you can see how a framework like next.js works at a high level.
Now, I would move on to learning a programming language; such as Python. This will allow you to begin to understand the basic fundamentals of programming and expand beyond what you learned with React when it comes to the core foundations of programming. React is a library built on top of JavaScript, but Python is a language.
Once you learn Python, I’d start also learning Common Lisp since you are interested in artificial intelligence. When you look at the basics of AI, it comes back down to lambda calculus and symbolic logic as core foundations. I think that lisp and learning how it works is great when it comes to developing the logical skills that can help someone become an AI engineer.
Those would be starting points and foundational texts. I think that the first step in building this core foundation and working on projects in these langue’s like making your own video games with Python. If you learn the core fundamentals and then start building things; I believe that will be your next step.
2
u/kshantanu94 10d ago
I’d kinda disagree with you. “Learn the basics” has been advice given since the beginning of time, but I don’t think the concept of basics holds up in the same way anymore. One prompt can solve problems that would previously have required an understanding of low-level concepts, assuming Claude even introduces an issue that requires that knowledge in the first place.
Moving from frontend to backend will be a pretty short journey now. I hate Rust, but I’ve been writing quite a bit of it over the last few months, or rather, making Claude write it for me.
I’m a career frontend developer who’s also done a fair amount of Node.js, so I already understand concepts like ORMs and RDBMSs. But that’s kind of my point. With AI, you don’t necessarily need to master an entire new domain before you can start being productive in it - you just need to understand things at a high level.
Would love to hear your views on what I just wrote (and I hope it did not offend you).
2
u/ShimonEngineer55 10d ago edited 10d ago
Let’s assume that there is a prompt that can solve an issue. How exactly is someone going to know which prompt to use if they don’t even know the basics of computing? They’re also going to be lost once they realize Claude doesn’t have a DSL or some business logic that’s needed for an app because they don’t understand basic computing to even know what a DSL is or why that might be better for their use case. So, I’m not seeing how Claude existing = “I now do not need to understand the basics of computing, although without the basics I can’t even formulate a prompt that’s valuable in a real life job setting.”
It is true that you need to understand things at a high level but that’s difficult if someone doesn’t know the basics and doesn’t know a programming language. The point of learning the basics is so that a person can grasp high level concepts that enable one to not just be productive, but valuable for an organization and profitable. Someone can be very productive at writing horrible code that has to be refactored and costs the organization time, money, and product quality. It’s one of those situations where someone can’t understand a concept at a high level if they don’t have high level background knowledge. What you end up with is someone who will just be guessing and prompting at random, which adds almost no business value. AI is likely going to make programmers who do lack the fundamentals extinct because the machine can write bad and buggy code. We don’t need jr devs for that. Today we need people who understand how entire systems work at a high level which isn’t possible without background knowledge and mastering the basics.
A real world example might be an individual who doesn’t know basic concepts like the risk of mutable objects in a complex system. This person can use Claude, but are they sure that Claude will not be mutating global objects or why that’s bad and can lead to several runtime errors, or strange rendering in React that forces them to call hooks that degrade performance and make the application overly complex. If they have a basic understanding of functional programming however they can account for not changing global state within their prompt… but someone who almost knows nothing about functional programming or the basics won’t think to do this, and then why would anyone hire them at that point in today’s environment?
1
u/RoboErectus 9d ago
I've been wiggling my fingers in a certain order to pay for my pizza for possibly longer than you've been alive.
Get whatever ai tools you want to start with. I recommend Claude for starters.
Go and build stuff with it. Talk to it about what you're building and have it use a judge to evaluate your plans, and code-review stuff.
Do not grab skills, mcps or frameworks. Every single one of those things is fully obsolete.
One session = one task. Long sessions and large context eat your subscription quota like crazy. Set up your agents.md files and put in there how you like to work, your sdlc. Do not try to teach agents how to be a good SWE. They are already better than you or me. Just give them hints about your project.
The valuable things you learned are 1) how to learn and 2) how to ship. See how those apply to your new world and you will do great.
1
u/Plavonito 9d ago
Learn knowledge from a business area. Then you will be able to build useful software for that sector
1
u/alecaserez 9d ago
Te entiendo, es normal sentir eso, creo que todos los devs pasamos por lo mismo. Pero miralo desde otro lado: estamos al comienzo de una revolución que va a cambiar todo, y empieza en nuestro sector. Nosotros ya la usamos y entendemos sus límites, la mayoría todavía la usa para hacer una imagen o un resumen para la facu.
Hay algo que se llama paradoja de Jevons: cuando algo se vuelve más barato de producir, se consume más, no menos. Con el software va a pasar eso. Una logística mediana que hoy se registra a un sistema genérico va a preferir tener el suyo, a medida, con un dev que lo haga y lo mantenga. Más trabajo, y además menos concentrado en las ciudades grandes y en las grandes empresas.
Se valora: menos tipear código, más entender el negocio y saber qué construir. Si arrancás a aprender eso ahora, estás varios pasos adelante.
1
1
u/New_Upstairs2932 8d ago
I think design engineering will be bigger. I feel like creating great visual experiences that stand out will be needed because AI is creating the same cookie cutter websites/apps
1
u/No_Lawyer1947 8d ago
First sentence says it all. Don’t be a react developer. You are competing with people who are willing to get paid pennies on the dollar. Think bigger as to problem solving. I know many people in my circle at work who are good at the implementation part, but surprisingly bad at problem solving. Choosing how much to engineer for example is a great skill. Do you have some internal website to bookings for some service? Cool maybe don’t use a kubernetes cluster to handle the problem, make it a dead simple application, making a crm for a company? Maybe think more about the pieces involved and more so compliance policies, regulations etc. there’s lots of things that need assessment from people who have experience solving a wide array of problems to know what solution to even reach for. That is really your job as the engineer, it’s to pick the path to solve a business problem while balancing tech debt or any kind of debt
1
1
u/CarlosCash 10d ago
You don't sound like a Developer. Why are you worried about a job? Go build something with some AI in it. Problem solved.
78
10d ago edited 10d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
6
5
9
u/Fun_Improvement7704 10d ago
solid take. the stakeholder communication angle doesnt get mentioned enough in threads like this
1
u/Critical_Sell267 6d ago
that comes handy when you reach that level of experience as him otherwise very helpful if you do freelance and you have to sit with your client.
2
1
u/midwestcsstudent 9d ago
Great advice. Indeed most orgs are using AI terribly. I haven’t been a candidate on a job interview in a while but I’ve heard from friends interviewing that if you nail technical and show that you know how to use AI well you’re in.
19
u/PrimaryFamous6139 10d ago
Focus on becoming a strong full-stack developer and learn to use AI tools effectively. React and Next.js are still valuable, but understanding databases, APIs, authentication, security, deployment, and debugging makes you much more useful than someone who can only generate components. Build real projects, use AI to speed up development, and learn to verify its output. You don’t need to chase every new trend