Frontend

The frontend (also called the client side) is the layer of a web application that executes in the user's browser. It is responsible for layout, visual design, user interaction, and displaying data fetched from the backend. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the fundamental technologies; frameworks like React, Vue, and Svelte build on top of them.

For vibe coders, AI is especially powerful for frontend work: describing a UI in words ("a two-column layout with a sidebar, dark mode support, and a search bar") produces usable code faster than building it from scratch. Tailwind CSS has become the dominant styling system in AI-generated frontends because its class names are descriptive and LLMs have strong training data for it.

Key concepts to understand: components (reusable UI building blocks), state (data that changes over time), routing (how different pages are shown), and API calls (fetching data from the backend).