Survey of 120+ Frontend Developers Reveals AI Hasn't Solved the Hardest Parts of the Job
Date pickers, accessibility compliance, and AI-generated spaghetti code top the list of frustrations from 120+ senior developers surveyed at JSNation and React Summit, even as AI coding tools reach mainstream adoption.
Progress asked 120 developers at JSNation and React Summit in Amsterdam: what do you still hate working on? The answers reveal a pattern. Not one of the top frustrations has been meaningfully improved by two years of AI coding tools.
Date pickers took the top spot with nine mentions. Accessibility compliance landed seven. AI-related work came third with eight mentions, but not AI as a tool. Developers cited the cleanup burden: prompt engineering to get usable output, then hours of fixing hooks violations, unnecessary useState calls, and hallucinated CSS. One respondent said "I spend more time debugging AI-generated React than I ever spent writing it from scratch."
The rest of the list: requirements churn (6), data grids (5), rich text editors (4), design system maintenance (4). Every item is an integration problem. It sits at the boundary between code and something else: a browser spec, a designer's intent, a PM's requirements, assistive technology, a library's API. AI coding tools, which operate on code text, keep missing these boundaries.
The takeaway is not that AI is useless. It is that the current generation of assistants solves the easiest part, generating a first draft, and leaves you holding the hardest: making it correct, accessible, and maintainable. Nobody said "I hate writing simple CRUD endpoints now." The integration seams are not.