The Future of Web Development: Our Predictions for 2023
by İsmail Arılık, Software Engineer
1. AI Assisted Development
With the launch of Github Copilot in 2022 the industry got its first glimpse at what it would look like to have Stack Overflow plumbed straight into your IDE. Copilot has given thousands of developers what they always longed for: not having to resort to a search engine even for the smallest things.
In 2023 we can expect these assistants to become more sophisticated and for that to have ripple effects throughout the industry.
We predict that traffic to MDN will decline precipitously as developers realise they no longer need to look up JS array methods. We also expect Stack Overflow’s sister site, Prompt Overflow, to become one of the most popular sites on the internet in a matter of months.
2. Rendering Patterns
To server render or not to server render? In 2022 the owners of the internet, Vercel, decided that instead of making this choice once for your whole application, now you will need to decide every time you write a new component.
Because front-end development was becoming too easy (!), the same people who write CSS will now need to know how Streaming SSR and Progressive Hydration work.
While complex, this pattern offers noticeable speed and SEO gains. Therefore, we can expect other front-end web frameworks to at least begin to embrace this approach in 2023.
3. JS Runtimes
Because choosing a JS runtime was one of the only areas where a developer wasn’t paralysed with choice, in early 2020, the creator of Node gave us something new to agonise over. The launch of Deno and Bun heralded the final mutation of JavaScript into a language that can truly run anywhere it wasn’t intended to.
These new JS runtimes mean we can now serve HTML faster than ever before. For example, we can reduce a site’s Time to First Byte (TTFB) and increase user satisfaction.
It’s quite possible to predict that web frameworks and tools that prioritize speed will take steps to adapt to these runtimes in 2023. This will allow developers to create faster and more efficient applications.