> It's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one.

It's not like blaming the bicycle, that's the whole point of my analogy to programming languages. Like I said, learning a new programming language in a few weeks of regular use is a common experience. This also happens with bikes, because you can try a few things, lose balance, make a few intuitive adjustments, and iterate easily.

This just doesn't work with CSS. There are so many pitfalls, corner cases and reasoning is non-compositional and highly contextual. That's the complete opposite of learning to ride a bike or learning a new programming language.

You literally do need to read like, a formal specification of CSS to really understand it, and even then you'll regularly get tripped up. People just learn to stick to a small subset of CSS for which they've managed to build a predictable model for, which is why we got toolkits like Bootstrap.

Edit: this also explains why things like Tailwind are popular: it adds a certain amount of predictability and composition to CSS. Using CSS was way worse in the past when browser compatibility was worse, but it's still not a great experience.

That's a lot of words to say "trust me bruh" which is kind of poetic given that's the entire model (no pun intended) that LLMs work on.

A little hypothesis: a lot of .Net and Java stuff is mainlined from a giant mega corp straight to developers through a curated certification, MVP, blogging, and conference circuit apparatus designed to create unquestioned corporate friendly, highly profitable, dogma. You say ‘website’ and from the letter ‘b’ they’re having a Pavlovian response (“Azure hosted SharePoint, data lake, MSSQL, user directory, analytics, PowerBI, and…”).

Microsoft’s dedication to infusing OpenAI tech into everything seems like a play to cut even those tepid brains out of the loop and capture the vehicles of planning and production. Training your workforce to be dependent on third-party thinking, planning, and advice is an interesting strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

We already had that happen. When GPT 5 was released, it was much less sycophantic. All the sad people with AI girl/boyfriends threw a giant fit because OpenAI "murdered" the "soul" of their "partner". That's why 4o is still available as a legacy model.

I can absolutely see that happening. It's already kind of happened to me a couple of times when I found myself offline and was still trying to work on my local app. Like any addiction, I expect it to cost me some money in the future

The next best thing is to use the leading open source/open weights models for free or for pennies on OpenRouter [1] or Huggingface [2].

An article about the best open weight models, including Qwen and Kimi K2 [3].

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/models

[2]: https://huggingface.co

[3]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/

This is currently negative expected value over the lifetime of any hardware you can buy today at a reasonable price, which is basically a monster Mac - or several - until Apple folds and rises the price due to RAM shortages.

This requires hardware in the tens of thousands of dollars (if we want the tokens spit out at a reasonable pace).

Maybe in 3-5 years this will work on consumer hardware at speed, but not in the immediate term.

The reliance on SaaS LLMs is more akin to comparing owning a horse vs using a car on a monthly subscription plan.

This is a poor analogy. Cars (mostly) don't require a subscription.

Can't believe this car bubble has lasted so long. It's gonna pop any decade now!

I mean, they're taking away parts of cars at the moment. You gotta pay monthly to unlock features your car already has.