I was asked this question by a frontend engineer on LinkedIn. Here are my thoughts.

I believe the role will evolve to put more emphasis on both designing and building user interfaces and experiences.

What I mean by that is if other engineers (full stack, backend, even frontend) are expected to be more product and business oriented, then frontend engineers will be expected to be more UI and UX oriented. This is an extension of the mixing of these designer roles with the frontend developer role and with AI tools, and the two are converging. You no longer have to know HTML and CSS (or modern UI libraries) to build frontends and you don't need to know how to use Figma to build beautiful designs. Just as Lovable and Bolt, and countless other platforms, brought vibe coding to the masses, so too is Google Stitch 2.0 poised to bring vibe designing to non designers.

Of course, just as knowing software engineering principles gets you beyond vibe coding, so too will knowing design fundamentals get you beyond "vibe designing".

A good historical example is smartphone apps. The iPhone and Android smartphones required new design paradigms for a different interaction mechanism (touch vs mouse) and engineering paradigms were brought from the web and adapted to mobile platforms. I think we will see something similar happen as the industry moves beyond chat interfaces into agentic ones. This is likely a once in a generation type of computing shift. The equivalent paradigm shift here is that the interface is increasingly hidden. It no longer has to serve the user directly - it hides behind loading states, 'thinking' text, and 'scrolling chains of reasoning'.

Many products are shifting to the chat interface because it is the most simple interface. It is like the command line for regular people. This is important to note because it is the new starting point. It is the floor, not the ceiling.

The more interesting shift is what is happening with agentic interfaces, the ones that are blurring the lines between traditional software UI built for humans, with buttons, forms, and page navigation, and the API/CLI driven interface that is ideal for agents.

There are not many mass market products yet. Anthropic's suite of dedicated Claude apps - Code, Desktop, and Cowork - are some of the most well known ones but they are only scratching the surface. These tools give you familiar interfaces to work with - a command line, a chat input box, folders for organization - but the functionality is hidden because the agent is using them behind the scenes. There is a spectrum here. On developer oriented tools like Claude Code, the tool use is exposed as standard output. On more user friendly tools like Claude Desktop and Claude Cowork, they are hidden in collapsible panels or behind loading text.

Which interface you build, and how you build it, is now deeply intertwined with who your user is. A developer wants the black box exposed. A non-technical user wants to feel superhuman and natural, even conversational. Some want voice. There is no longer a one-size-fits-all answer, and that decision is inseparable from how something looks and feels.

Smartphones and mobile apps, despite their ubiquity, are still driven by design patterns carried over from the desktop era. The same inertia exists today. Most agentic tools are just chat boxes bolted onto powerful backends. The frontend engineers who figure out what comes after that will define how this era of computing actually feels to use.

That is the frontier. And it will be built by engineers who treat UX fluency as a core technical skill, not a soft one.