Panel: Who Builds the Frontend Now? (And What Breaks When They Do)

QCon London 2026

Session

Panel: Who Builds the Frontend Now? (And What Breaks When They Do)

Wednesday Mar 18 / 01:35PM GMT, Windsor (5th Fl.) at The QEII Centre, London

Abstract

You're mass-adopting tools you don't fully trust. You're shipping faster but your delivery stability is dropping. Your juniors are getting harder to hire and the ones you do hire are measurably worse at debugging. Meanwhile, someone just rebuilt your framework of choice in a week using AI and $1,100 worth of API tokens.

This panel is for frontend and mobile engineers trying to make sense of what's actually happening versus what's hype. Practitioners from platform infrastructure, observability, serverless architecture, digital consultancy, and mobile development will share what they're seeing on the ground and debate what it means. You'll leave with:

  • A reality check from people building and shipping right now - what's actually changing in production error patterns, deployment data, and client expectations, and what's just noise?
  • An honest conversation about your expertise - what happens to the value of your skills when AI can scaffold a production app, how debugging and architectural judgement change when you're reviewing code you didn't write, and whether the "coder to orchestrator" transition is genuinely accessible or just a comforting narrative
  • Practical perspectives on where to invest your time - which skills the panellists see becoming more valuable, what "architecture as a moat" looks like in their work, and whether you should be building for AI agents as well as humans

The claims above are grounded in recent research: Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey (84% AI adoption, 3% high trust), DORA 2024 (delivery stability declines with AI adoption), Anthropic's coding skills study (AI-assisted developers score lower on debugging), and Cloudflare's viNext (Next.js API surface rebuilt in under a week).

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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