AI Can’t Solve It All: Here’s What 120+ Frontend Developers Say They Still Hate Working On

What still causes the most friction when building modern web applications? 120+ developers at JSNation and React Summit weigh in.

While we were at JSNation and React Summit (read about our hackathon there!), we wanted to take advantage of our booth space to do a little user research. We asked folks who stopped by to answer a simple question for us: What still causes the most friction when building modern web applications?

Instead of running a formal survey, we set up a whiteboard, handed folks a sticky note and a sharpie, and invited them to air their grievances. Over the two days of the combined conferences, we collected 120+ responses across two prompts:

• Day 1 (JS Nation): What’s the most annoying frontend task or component to build from scratch?
• Day 2 (React Summit): What does AI still get wrong when building UI in React?

The responses were (at least to me) surprisingly consistent. While frameworks, tooling and AI assistants continue to evolve, many of the age-old pain points haven’t disappeared. Turns out, it sucked to build a date picker 10 years ago and it still sucks today.

Building UI Components Is Still a Challenge

We left the first question open-ended, allowing folks to pick between tasks and components that they found annoying. Personally, I was expecting to see more tasks than components—especially now that we can AI-generate components fairly quickly—but that’s not what happened. In fact, the split between individual components and tasks was a fairly even split.

Date picker components topped the list, with developers calling out everything from timezone handling to accessibility and date ranges. Unsurprisingly, AI is next up—adopting any new technology is going to come with some pain points and process adjustments. Accessibility was in third place with several callouts about struggling with compliance and testing, specifically.

AI Has Become Part of the Workflow—and Part of the Friction

As you can see in the results above, even before we introduced an AI-specific discussion on Day 2 developers were already talking about AI. But when we asked specifically about AI-generated React code, the conversation shifted from whether AI is useful to where it still struggles.

The top complaint was related to React architecture. Developers repeatedly mentioned AI-generated code that:

• Violates the rules of hooks
• Creates unnecessary useState calls
• Places state outside components
• Generates new components instead of reusing existing ones
• Produces code without understanding project requirements
• Includes poor quality CSS

Some Pain Points Refuse to Go Away

Across both days, several themes kept resurfacing. Accessibility appeared on both walls, suggesting that AI hasn’t eliminated many of the challenges developers face when building inclusive interfaces. Developers also repeatedly mentioned:

• Design systems
• Figma-to-code workflows
• Localization
• Testing
• State management
• Performance
• CSS

These aren’t new problems—and many of them have to do with very human aspects of software development such as coordination across teams, inclusivity, creating work for a global audience and user testing.

So? What Does All This Mean

The difficulty now (as it always has been) is in the integration of tools into cohesive systems. The tools have changed, but the challenge has not. Frontend developers today are spending their time wrestling with accessibility, architecture, complex UI components, evolving requirements and figuring out how to integrate AI into real production workflows.

AI is clearly changing how developers build software, but it hasn’t eliminated the need for thoughtful engineering. In many cases, it’s shifted developers’ attention toward reviewing, refining and improving generated code rather than writing every line themselves. Whether that’s an improvement or not is something only time will tell.

The good news is that many of the component-centric frustrations that developers shared at our booth—date pickers, data grids, accessibility, design systems and more—all have something in common: they’re problems with existing solutions.

Modern component libraries exist so developers can focus on building the unique parts of their applications instead of spending weeks recreating foundational UI. Likewise, AI tools are most effective when paired with production-ready building blocks that help developers generate better code, faster.

Investing in the right UI foundation can remove much of the friction developers told us they’re still experiencing today. We may not have the answer to every frontend development struggle, but there are plenty that the Progress Telerik and Kendo UI libraries can help address today.