The front end is in the hands of the enemy. They can do what they want with it.

The back end is not. If it falls into the hands of the enemy then it is game over.

Security-wise, it is clearly acceptable for the front end to be of lower quality than the back end.

> Why is it acceptable for front end code to be of lower quality than the rest?

While I don't think that f/end should be of a lower quality than the rest of the stack, I also think that:

1. f/end gets the most churn (i.e. rewritten), so it's kinda pointless if you're spending an extra $FOO months for a quality output when it is going to be significantly rewritten in ($FOO * 2) months.

2. It really is more fault tolerant - an error in the backend stack could lead to widespread data corruption. An error on the f/end results in, typically, misaligned elements that are hard to see/find.

"It's just the UI" is a prevalent misconception in my experience.

My favorite is these "vibe coding" situations that leave SQL injection and auth vulns because copy-paste ChatGPT. Never change.

Far from making me fear for my job, LLMs have me more confident than ever that I'll always be able to find some kind of paying programming work, even if it's all short-term contracts (as I get even older).

So objectively false that I don’t even know where to begin.

You sharing that crystal ball?