A Frontend IDE
By Alex Mackenzie at
A frontend convergence
UX/UI designers and frontend engineers have been converging for some time. I’m undecided if “design engineer” is apt, but if we look at my friend Nev’s work (& LinkedIn bio!) at Evervault it’s clear that designers can write some pretty gnarly JS.
Clearly, this latest wave in generative AI is abrupt-enough of a change to expedite this trend. The question then becomes, does this new class of engineer have the right integrated development environment?
Currently, as far as I know, to design a site like Evervault’s the core tooling you need is: an IDE, Figma and Blender/Spline. Perhaps something on the animation side also to build advanced SVG path animations, etc. Should this all be bundled together?
Cue: “Framer does a really good job…”. Yes, 100%. I love Framer. However, I also love specific animation libraries (yes, beyond Framer motion), three.js, and dare I say it.. writing code.
Taking the above into account, what would a, from the ground-up, “frontend IDE” look like?
(Future) Discussion happening at this substack thread: https://whynowtech.substack.com/p/a-frontend-ide/comments