Jeremy Keith

The Mythology Of Conscious AI

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

Performance-Optimized Video Embeds with Zero JavaScript – Frontend Masters Blog

This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.

How to raise children

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.

Training your replacement | Go Make Things

I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”

For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.

And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.

AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.

Permacomputing principles

Here are some design princples I can get behind: long-term thinking, resilience, flexibility and seamfulness.

A considered approach to generative AI in front-end… | Clearleft

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

An in-depth guide to customising lists with CSS - Piccalilli

Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

A programmer’s loss of identity - ratfactor

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, “heirloom programmers”?

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

Deep Blue

My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:

…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt

I recently wrote:

The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code.

That’s the difference between technical debt and cognitive debt.

John has written lots more on this.

10 Thoughts On “AI,” February 2026 Edition | Whatever

1. I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work.
2. I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist.
3. People in general are burning out on “AI.”
4. I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work.
5. “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form.
6. “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies.
7. There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect.
8. The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows.
9. It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.”
10. Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it.

Molly guard in reverse – Unsung

Marcin’s history of “molly guards” in hardware and software:

Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance.

JS-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals

Frameworks like React are often perceived as accelerators, or even as the only sensible way to do web development. There’s this notion that a more “modern” stack (read: JS-heavy, where the JS ends up running on the user’s browser) allows you to be more agile, release more often with fewer bugs, make code more maintainable, and ultimately launch better sites. In short, the claim is that this approach will offer huge improvements to developer experience, and that these DevEx benefits will trickle down to the user.

But over the years, this narrative has proven to be unrealistic, at best. In reality, for any decently sized JS-heavy project, you should expect that what you build will be slower than advertised, it will keep getting slower over time while it sees ongoing work, and it will take more effort to develop and especially to maintain than what you were led to believe, with as many bugs as any other approach.

Where it comes to performance, the important thing to note is that a JS-heavy approach (and particularly one based on React & friends) will most likely not be a good starting point; in fact, it will probably prove to be a performance minefield that you will need to keep revisiting, risking a detonation with every new commit.

Not long now ’till Web Day Out — just three weeks!

It’s also not that long until the start of a new financial year so if you’ve got training budget that needs to be used this year, send your team to Web Day Out. Not only is it excellent value for money, it’s also going to have an incredibly high density of knowledge bombs per talk.

CSS! Progressive web apps! Web typography! Browser support! And much more.

If you like the sound of Web Day Out, you’ll also like State Of The Browser, which is just ten days away. In-person tickets for that event are now sold out, but online streaming tickets are still available.

Better yet, if you buy a ticket to Web Day Out, you automatically get a free online streaming ticket for State Of The Browser!

So get your ticket in the next ten days, enjoy State Of The Browser from the comfort of your own home, and then enjoy a trip to Brighton for Web Day Out on Thursday, 12 March. See you there!

Reduce the JS Workload with no- or lo-JS options

This is an excellent one-stop shop of interface patterns:

This is an organic collection of common JS patterns that can be replaced with just HTML, CSS, and no, or very low, JS. As HTML and CSS continue to mature, this collection should expand.

I miss thinking hard.

There are two wolves inside you…

My Builder side won’t let me just sit and think about unsolved problems, and my Thinker side is starving while I vibe-code. I am not sure if there will ever be a time again when both needs can be met at once.