The AI labs use each other's models constantly. It's also pragmatic: there are cases where one model can't do something but a different model can blow right through it.
There's an X thread where Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) shows his workflow of running 5 CC agents in the terminal using 5 tabs while running 10-15 instances of CC on the web [1] and how he moves projects from the terminal to the web and vice versa.
> I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers.
Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability.
Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout.
> They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners.
CSS is dramatically easier if you write it in order of specificity: styles that affect large parts of the DOM go at the top; more specific styles come later. Known as Inverted Triangle CSS (ITCSS), it has been around for a long time [1].
> It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation.
If you mean linting or adhering to coding guidelines, there are several; Stylelint is popular [2].
Any editor that supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), like VS Code and Neovim (among others), can use CSS and CSS Variables LSPs [3], [4] for code completion, diagnostics, formatting, etc.
> It's not meant to be generated.
Says who? There have been CSS generators and preprocessors since 2006, not to mention all the tools which turn mockups into CSS. LLMs have no problem generating CSS.
Lots of developers need to relearn CSS; the book Every Layout is a good start [5].
Developers can learn a new programming language in a few weeks to months of just using it. If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed.
> 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.
Actually, the invention of the printing press in 1450 created a similar disruption, economic panic and institutional fear similar to what we're experiencing now:
For centuries, the production of books was the exclusive domain of professional scribes and monks. To them, the printing press was an existential threat.
Job Displacement: Scribes in Paris and other major cities reportedly went on strike or petitioned for bans, fearing they would be driven into poverty.
The "Purity" Argument: Some critics argued that hand-copying was a spiritual act that instilled discipline, whereas the press was "mechanical" and "soulless."
Aesthetic Elitism: Wealthy bibliophiles initially looked down on printed books as "cheap" or "ugly" compared to hand-illuminated manuscripts. Some collectors even refused to allow printed books in their libraries to maintain their prestige.
I've seen this argument a few times before and I'm never quite convinced by it because, well, all those arguments are correct. It was an existential threat to the scribes and destroyed their jobs, the majority of printed books are considered less aesthetically pleasing than a properly illuminated manuscript, and hand copying is considered a spiritual act by many traditions.
I'm not sure if I say it's a correct argument, but considering everyone in this thread is a lot closer to being a scribe than a printing press owner, I'm surprised there's less sympathy.
What makes it even more odd for me is they are mostly describing doing nothing when using their agents. I see the "providing important context, setting guardrails, orchestration" bits appended, and it seems like the most shallow, narrowest moat one can imagine. Why do people believe this part is any less tractable for future LLMs? Is it because they spent years gaining that experience? Some imagined fuzziness or other hand-waving while muttering something about the nature of "problem spaces"? That is the case for everything the LLMs are toppling at the moment. What is to say some new pre-training magic, post-training trick, or ingenious harness won't come along and drive some precious block of your engineering identity into obsolescence? The bits about 'the future is the product' are even stranger (the present is already the product?).
To paraphrase theophite on Bluesky, people seem to believe that if there is a well free for all to draw from, that there will still exist a substantial market willing to pay them to draw from this well.
Having AI working with and for me is hugely exciting. My creativity is not something an AI can outmode. It will augment it. Right now ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive. Soon, ideas will be more valuable and implementation will be cheap. The economy is not zero sum nor is creativity.
Well the lesson is that for all of us who invested a lot of time and effort to become good software developers the value of our skill set is now near zero.
Many of the same skills that we honed by investing that time and effort into being good software developers make us good AI prompters, we simply moved another layer of abstraction up the stack.
This skill demonstrates how to tell an agent to make a non-generic website [1].
These are the money lines:
NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families
(Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes
(particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable
layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks
context-specific character.
Interpret creatively and make unexpected choices that feel genuinely
designed for the context. No design should be the same. Vary between
light and dark themes, different fonts, different aesthetics. NEVER
converge on common choices (Space Grotesk, for example) across
generations.
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