the entire industry has always been converging toward "cookie-cutter" ui, and tailwind is just this cycle's flavor and now on steroids with AI. Honestly for 90% of the stuff out there that's literally fine and probably better. There was a time when being extra creative in FE work was rewarded. If your product is very brand dependent then yeah maybe try to find your "voice" but for the vast majority of them, esp dev focused, they just need to work on other things and not try to re-invent solutions to solved problems.

i know we all like to pretend our meticulously engineered button and drop shadow animations are actually moving a needle, but you're optimizing the last few percent at that point. most saas FE devs should be solving other problems like the UX and performance and not worry about more creative landing pages.

that "knowledge" we held was to combat the absolute shit that was the browser ecosystem 20 years ago lol. you could argue it was a time of great experimentation and creativity, but no unified ui/ux patterns, adding in css hacks and doctypes blah blah to try to catch all these weird edge cases, if you're still reminiscing that time not sure what to say. today's tooling while also messy in it's own way is 1000x bettter. also i've never in my life referred to it as "front of the frontend".

but dont leave ur bike or umbrella out.

after that its determining how people to digest info, some like docs (me), others want to sit thru a video, others NEED a person to guide them in person, some like tooltips, checklists, etc.

i'm not saying you need to litter your app with this stuff, but i don't think there is some magical UX pattern that always works.

the bar to "start" is lower and the bar to actually competency is higher now, juniors who want to actually learn instead of just pressing enter over and over again will do so regardless of whatever you do to "help" them.

i don't understand all this fear projected as if people won't have agency of learning just because LLMs make it easier to do certain things. i don't think it's contradictory at all. half the people here will never have to wrangle the bullshit i dealt with 20 years ago and i'm sure when i was dealing with it there was another 20 years of bullshit before me lol.

if you vibe code your app with no regard for the underlying code you will pay the price for it at some point in the future, anybody worth their salt will slow down enough to figure it out the "artisanal" way.

you mandate and "solve" this in a few weeks over 1:N channels and measure on a metric that nobody even fully understands yet = someone getting paid to bullshit some metrics on agentic productivity to executives. i agree with other posters, 12 months until a dumpster fire of shit reveals itself.

FWIW, i think it is the future but not in the way that'd described here.