The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.
I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:
There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.
You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.
Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.
Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.
If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.
But if, say, you’re a “writer” and you’re using an LLM to “help you” “write” or “think” because it’s easier and takes less time and thought, then I stand my ground; I can and do fault you.
Large language models help you build the thing faster, which is the primary end goal for your company but only sometimes for you. My primary goal might be to build the thing faster, but it also might be to learn something durably, to enjoy the work, to look forward to Monday.
I don’t like the mental fragility of not fully understanding how my own code works, where AI-generated code is “mine” in that it’s attributed to me in the git blame and I’m its maintainer going forward.
There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.
To be clear, I think AI will be ultimately extremely helpful. I still am using it on my projects. I am going to use it at my next job. I, personally, don’t hate AI.
But I can’t deny that the vibes right now are awful.
Not just bad, awful. It’s not just the “chat we’re cooked you’re the permanent underclass” stuff influencers say. It’s not just the “everybody is fucked” hyperbole CEOs sprout. It’s the actual, day-to-day experience with the technology. I’m a programmer—AI actually helps me a lot. But for normal people, their interactions are profoundly more negative, and none of the people behind this technology seem to care.
You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.
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.
This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.
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.
A thoughtful approach from Sam:
- 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.
- When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
- Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.
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…
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.
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.
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.
- I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work.
- I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist.
- People in general are burning out on “AI.”
- I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work.
- “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form.
- “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies.
- There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect.
- The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows.
- It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.”
- Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it.
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.
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.