Pico CSS is no longer maintained

▲ Pico CSS is no longer maintained(github.com)

90 points by henrid 4 hours ago | 25 comments

▲ shubhamjain 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> To stay relevant, Pico CSS would need a full rewrite: plain modern CSS instead of Sass, built on features it doesn't use today (OKLCH colors, cascade layers, Popover, anchor positioning) with fallbacks for older browsers

Why? Why? Why? I hate how everyone seems convinced they need to adopt the latest and greatest browser features just to stay relevant. I hate oklch and I hate Tailwind popularized it. I don't care how scientifically accurate it is at representing human color perception. It's a PITA to understand a new type of color system, and learn to tweak it, especially when HSL/RGB just worked fine.

▲ sphars 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some recent alternatives/successors/forks that are in the same vein as Pico

- Nimble: https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css/demo/pico.html

- Sumi.css: https://vladocar.github.io/Sumi.css/docs.html

- Blades: https://github.com/anyblades/blades

- Oat: https://oat.ink/

	▲	mikae1 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		All of them failed my ten second evaluation. It's amazing how many mediocre CSS frameworks that are out there.

▲ Brajeshwar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

First, I confess that I had built quite a lot of CSS Frameworks and Design Systems in my early developer life. So, this is going to be more of a personal experience.

Ever since Coding Assistant LLMs became pretty good (2025-Q4 - 2026-Q1), I feel that it makes very little sense to continue to use pre-defined CSS Frameworks that 'has everything.' Of course, it is still OK if the general team decides on one, and they are OK (such as the Tailwinds, MUI of the frontend world.)

I have used Foundation[1] and Bourbon[2] extensively. Mostly because I can break it down and take just what the project needs and keep it within a low CSS budget for any project.

With that in mind, in the 10+ projects that started for some of the biggest brands of the world, I just defined the CSS framework, design systems, design token, with room for extension as the project grows. Claude Code is my tool of choice for now and I just let it run overnight, tweak as the project scaffolds and finally takes about less than a week to have a complete CSS framework in just plain CSS, and JavaScript where it needs to talk to the broader frontend.

1. https://get.foundation

2. https://www.bourbon.io

▲ eterps 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I really enjoyed using Pico CSS, but I understand the choice.

Thank you Lucas Larroche for building Pico CSS and sharing it with us.

▲ Retr0id 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://github.com/anyblades/blades seems to be a continuation in the same spirit

	▲	anydigital 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for sharing! Same spirit, same underlying code. We’re actively maintaining Blades CSS on GitHub and Discord, and would love Community feedback there. We also set up a dedicated page outlining key details: https://blades.dev/css/pico/

▲ steve_adams_86 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A little sad in a way, but this seems like the right call. I haven't used Pico in a very long time, and I don't think I'd choose it today.

	▲	nchmy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What would you choose?

▲ verandaguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I haven't done frontend dev in a while, but one thing stands out to me here... they call out using OKLCH colours, which I had to look up. (For the uninitiated, this is a cylindrical projection of the also-new-to-me Oklab colour space, which appears largely unrelated to the older CIE L*a*b* colour space).

Do people actually use this? In particular, before LLMs ate the world, I mean. When I did frontend, it was hex, or if you felt fancy, `rgba(...)` (though at that point named colours had mostly fallen out of style).

Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables?

	▲	jcranmer 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, people use it in practice. But it's not being used for the thing you're thinking of. RGB is fine for specifying a color. I mean, there are issues with RGB colorspaces and whatnot, but if you need to pick the background of a page or the color of text, there's no real reason not to use RGB. The problem with RGB is that it is really bad at color interpolation. You can't take the average of the red, green, and blue components of two colors and expect a usable color in the middle to come out. Instead, you need to move to a perceptual color space. CIELAB is the old perceptual color space of choice; Oklab is the new perceptual color space of choice. Color interpolation is needed for things like gradients or information visualization, where you need to say things like "20% of the way between color A and color B".
	▲	Rapzid an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Do people actually use this? Yes. OKLCH is actually MORE intuitive when creating shades because it's based around human perception. It also supports wide color spaces like P3, where rgba is, IIRC, bound to sRGB. The utility of these color spaces and color functions isn't lost just because LLM. Color systems haven't gone anywhere. Would highly recommend reading up on OKLCH if you haven't already. A lot of people put a lot of effort into promoting this and bringing it to baseline..
	▲	velcrovan 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Well I use it on my personal site: the colors change with the weather and seasons [1]. Oklab’s so-what is that the hues are perceptually a uniform brightness, unlike HSL (which I started with) where blues and reds look a lot brighter than greens and yellows at the same saturation/lightness. So in my case where color shifting is happening, Oklab actually helps. I don’t know how it’s better than HSL for simple UI elements unless maybe you can get physically brighter values that pop out more on certain screens. [1]: https://joeldueck.com
	▲	Brajeshwar 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes, since the last couple of years. I tend to help architect and scaffold large projects that goes on for years, and changes a lot of developers, designers in its lifecycle. I was pretty confident of moving to OKLCH about 4-years ago and have have had it as default. OKLCH values are now the source of truth for these projects, and other design elements — all the way to Powerpoints (HEX/RGB) and Print (CMYK) are derived from OKLCH. There are variations but most people don’t even know the difference. This started way back working with my long-term business partner and he built a pretty good tool to help visualize and tinker with it. Website https://colorcolor.in Source https://github.com/saneef/color-color
	▲	NetOpWibby 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		`Do people actually use this?` Yes. I made https://uchu.style after I read this blog post: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rg... I love OKLCH. Awkward to say, beautiful to look at.
	▲	8n4vidtmkvmk 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes. And I'd argue it's more intuitive if all colors with the same lightness value are in fact the same lightness. Hue and chroma are pretty easy to understand too.
	▲	sergiomattei 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is my fave article on the subject: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rg...

▲ j45 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pico is a great little library.

Thank you to the developer and maintainer

For what it’s worth I had to force Claude early in to use pico and not ever generate react or ornate tailwind.

Pico is extraordinary for standalone tools where ai can’t let complexity build out of control.

Maybe there’s other options but pico is what got it done, and vanilla LLMs has a hard time keeping something this simple and elegant and flexible.

	▲	anydigital 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		100%

▲ psadri 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hmm. I use pico. They could use an agent to modernize it!

	▲	0c3ca83 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, but why? Writing code for agents to use isn't fun, and buying tokens for it is a waste of money.

▲ u8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What a tragedy.

▲ smlx 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does anyone know a similar project doing this?

	▲	anydigital 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We do: https://github.com/anyblades/blades Already plain modern CSS instead of Sass, has Popover API, and CSS layers for individual components, OKLCH colors are on the way. Drop-in compatible with Pico CSS (via underlying fork)
	▲	efilife 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But why? Is it not relevant anymore? It's as useful and capable as it was years ago