Is frontend a solved problem?

“Frontend is a solved problem,” a very smart person told me the other day.

He was referring to anyone being able to prompt storefronts from scratch. And to some extent, he is right! The fact that agents can code a decent storefront from thin air is crazy magical.

And the same goes for music. You can prompt your way to a studio-mastered Mozart/Madonna/Hendrix-style hit with an Abba hook and it will be impressive. Until you get to the party and nobody wants to listen to it.

Wow, you think. How come people don’t understand how great this is? I made this using a finger and a phone! The answer is simple: people on the receiving end don’t care about how things are made. They care about how it makes them feel. Very few people feel great when listening to AI music.

On Deezer, AI makes up more than half of all new uploads but only one to three percent of listening, and Spotify has taken more than fifty million AI slop and spam tracks out of its recommendations this year.

The impressiveness factor of AI creation is already past its due date, and storefronts are no exception. A shopper doesn’t care how a store was made. They care how it feels to shop.

A store that sells products for 100 million or more a year is not a problem to solve. It’s an opportunity. It’s easy to get star-struck by the endlessness of agentic technology. The more useful question is a simple one: is it good, or just good enough?

Good starts with people

Good enough starts with the tools and what they can do. Good starts with the people who will shop the store: what they love about the brand, what makes them hesitate, what would bring them back next season. Those answers come from conversations, research and taste, and they shape everything that follows.

We used to cut ideas to fit the budget. Now we can try them before budgeting.

The time that used to go into boilerplate now goes into the details customers notice: organic user interfaces, sub-second load time, buttons exactly where they should be, recommendations that actually work, copy that sounds like the brand, a site that never breaks. That is where high-performing storefronts are made.

Humans + Machines

This matters even more with younger shoppers. Gen Z has grown up with generated content on every scroll, and now they look for the opposite: real people, real products and brands they know exist. That is good news for any brand with something real to show.

Agents are the perfect companion, not the solution. The solution is still a team that knows the brand and its customers, now working with a tireless colleague that loves repetitive work and hallucinations.

So yes, good enough is one prompt away. Good is what people and agents make together. Let’s celebrate the human + machine collaboration!