Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

I’m going out on a limb here and I’ll say that as much will change about how and what we develop for the web in the next 12 to 18 months than in the last 15 to 20 years.

And that’s what Web Directions Developer Summit this year will be all about. And how you can be best placed as these transformations happen.

In the early 2000s, we saw the web standards revolution, where we moved away from a grab bag of ad hoc techniques, to a structured, systematic approach founded on the standards of the W3C—HTML, CSS, DOM APIs, and JavaScript (OK that’s an ECMA standard…).

A decade later began the frameworks revolution, with React, Angular, and numerous other frameworks and libraries becoming the core technologies that developers worked with. The single-page application architecture became the key architecture for web applications in an era of mobile and the cloud.

I’d argue that we’re at the beginning of a era of development, centered on AI, large language models, and tooling like MCP.

The impact is already, and will be increasingly, profound. How we build, and what we build will change significantly.

This is not something I think where you can wait and see, or sit out for now.

A year from now we may have a significantly new approach to designing and developing for the web. And a year from now, getting up to speed with these approaches and technologies will be an enormous amount of work.

But right now, as in the early 2000s, and the early 2010s, there is an opportunity to get in while these technologies and approaches are still emerging—to get out in front of these transformations rather than later work desperately to catch up.

This year’s Developer Summit is all about this revolution. Read on for more and for extra special pricing for you.

The Age of Agents and AI-Native Development

This isn’t about chatbots or generating boilerplate code. As Kevin Yank will demonstrate at Web Directions Summit, building an AI agent requires just 400 lines of JavaScript—it’s not magic, it’s a learnable skill that will soon be table stakes for developers. Anna McPhee’s exploration of Model Context Protocol shows how frontend tools are already talking to AI in production environments.

But here’s what most developers don’t yet realize: we’re not just using AI to build—we’re building FOR AI. Katja Forbes calls them “machines as customers,” and she’s right. When AI agents become economic actors, making purchasing decisions and navigating our interfaces, everything about UX changes. Your next user might not be human.

The Architecture Revolution Nobody Saw Coming

While everyone’s focused on AI, a parallel transformation is reshaping how we structure applications. Lovee Jain’s work on Backend for Frontend patterns, Juntao Qiu’s evolution of frontend system design, and Zach Jensz’s offline-first AI web apps point to a fundamental rethinking of the entire stack.

The browser itself is evolving rapidly. Jono Alderson argues we should treat it as an ally, not an enemy—native browser capabilities now handle what once required entire frameworks. Tim Nguyen from Apple’s WebKit team is literally rewriting how form controls work. Lee Meyer shows how CSS alone can now create rich, interactive experiences that previously demanded JavaScript libraries.

Beyond the Browser: The Platform Shift

Perhaps most provocatively, Rupert Manfredi suggests we’re witnessing a platform shift that could displace both web and traditional apps entirely. His Unternet project isn’t just theoretical—it’s building the open protocols for what comes next. When AI clients can interact with services directly, when MCP allows seamless tool integration, when agents handle complex workflows autonomously, what happens to the traditional web?

Katja Forbes also engages with this question, asking “What if your next customer isn’t human?”

The Clock Is Ticking

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a year from now, the developers and teams who haven’t adapted to these changes will face the same fate as those who ignored responsive design in 2010 or clung to Flash in 2008. The architecture patterns, the development workflows, the very definition of “user” experience—all are shifting beneath our feet.

But right now—today—you have the opportunity to be ahead of the curve. To learn from practitioners who are already building with these technologies, not just theorizing about them.

Join Us at the Frontier

Web Directions Summit (November 19-20, Sydney and online) isn’t about speculation—it’s about practical, applicable knowledge from people shipping real products with these technologies. From Dmitry Baranovskiy’s mathematical foundations of design to Beau Vass’s crucial insights on accessibility in an AI world, from Eiji Kitamura’s state of web authentication to Tamas Piros showing AI that acts rather than just talks.

This is your chance to be part of the third revolution while it’s still taking shape. To be the developer, the team, the organization that embraces these transformations rather than being disrupted by them.

No one builds table-based layouts anymore. jQuery is a relic. The technologies you’re comfortable with today? In 18 months, they might be just as obsolete.

The question isn’t whether this revolution is coming—it’s whether you’ll help lead it or struggle to follow.

Get $200 off in-person tickets and $100 off streaming tickets for agencies, freelancers (that’s anyone paying their own way), educators, juniors, and not-for-profits.