Modern HTML and CSS have gained a surprising number of features that cover interactions and layout problems we used to solve with custom scripts or libraries. JavaScript obviously isn’t going anywhere, and there are plenty of things that still require it, but in 2026 I find myself needing it less often for ordinary website interfaces.
I generally prefer native browser features when they solve the problem well enough. They usually mean less code, fewer dependencies, better integration with browser behaviour and less maintenance later.
Notes
And frankly, my optimism for a better fate falters: The organized labor revolution never came. Workers walk a razorwire between rising costs of living and companies with bottomless coffers for legal violence, and for most of us, the risk is too high to try. Protests against the ecological impacts, or the extractive nature of the tooling and the work, or the ultimate impact to labor, are made to individuals — turning our ire against each other instead of the forces that demand we adapt adopt or die. It’s hard to fault people willing to compromise with these tools and their makers: as we’re finding out more than ever before, it doesn’t pay to stand on ethics. Gotta pay the bills.
Optimism as a whole feels like it's at a premium nowadays. The job market is tight and the industry is going through a massive change which feels in many cases to be the antithesis of what we developers have been doing our entire career.
For technology, I don’t think there’s gonna be any going back. The jury is out for other industries, but at least for us computer freaks, especially those at companies well-funded enough to easily weather the changing cost of tokens, I don’t think most will be seeing a future without prompted code. I think there will always be real creatives & sickos in this industry who write amazing things by hand and properly innovate, and there will be prompt-maximalists who gastown their way through the 9-5, and there will always be folks who came here because it’s a paycheck, and find some balance between the two.
Changes brought on by AI and LLM tooling is hitting developers hard. It's something that's not going to be going away. It's a matter of figuring out how to integrate LLMs into workflows and how to differentiate yourself.
That’s all to say: a sloppy, careless approach to interface design not only hurts your brand in terms of customer perception, but it can be an attack vector. The easier it is to sloppily reproduce what you sloppily ship, the easier it will be for your product or brand to be leveraged as a vehicle for exploiting your customers.
Something to think about. I've gotten plenty of phishing attempts that can be easily identified by poor reproduction of the real deal. If the real deal becomes less polished, it could become easier and easier to trick users into thinking a phishing attack is real.
“Who is writing these prompts and who is deciding that basically generating porn is what Copilot is now focused on? It’s hard to take things seriously when my focus has to be what model generated the appropriate bust size or which middle aged woman was put in the appropriate sexually suggestive position,” one contractor said in the thread.
It's not surprising that people are asking Copilot and other AI tools to do things of dubious legality and morality. But it gets worse when humans are left to having to constantly view and judge the prompts and results.
Some of the Copilot contractors complained in the private forum about accepting “tasks” that they unknowingly contained explicit unsafe or even potentially illegal images. “I just came across an image set that consisted of eight upskirt photos,” the contractor wrote, while asking for superiors to add an unsafe content flag to the task. On the same thread, another contractor said they had seen images of “some sort of animal sacrifice,” and a third said they had seen prompts that were for sexual moves and positions.
That's horrible and I would hope Microsoft and other companies looking for content moderation and/or LLM reviewers put more focus on providing support for those who do the work.
Every real problem was a small mystery. A bug that made no sense. A system behaving in a way the documentation swore was impossible. You could not brute force your way through it. You had to sit with it. You had to hold the whole thing in your head at once: the data flowing one way, the state changing another, the single assumption buried three layers down that turned out to be wrong.
There is a particular feeling when the shape of the problem finally clicks into place. It is not loud. It is a quiet click, somewhere behind your eyes, and suddenly the mess resolves into something you can actually see. For a moment you understand a small piece of the world completely. Not partially. Not approximately. Completely. There are not many places in adult life where you get that.
There really are few feelings better than running code you've been working on, a bug you've been fighting against, and finally seeing it work. Telling Claude or Copilot about the bug trying to find a solution just doesn't compare, even if it does find a good solution.
Writing code was one of the few parts of my life with a clean loop. A problem, a real one, with a real answer. Effort that mapped directly onto progress. A moment where the thing did not work, and then a moment, entirely because of you, where it did. Most of adult life does not offer that. The problems that matter most, the ones about people and organizations and health and the future, are ambiguous, slow, and never fully solved. Code gave me a small, honest corner of the world where I could put something right and actually know that I had.
I never thought of code this way. I like the thought.
“The factors that the government relies upon are the same type of circumstances that everyday Americans encounter on long road trips for many legitimate reasons. Many of us drive longer than we want to get to a desired destination, or to no destination at all other than the road and sights ahead,” she [Judge Sara Hill] added.
I'm glad at least one judge is recognizing the problems with some of the uses of Flock. And yes, the person pulled over might indeed be guilty, but everyone should be granted the same constitutional rights.
The harm doesn't end when the interaction ends, the researchers found. The long digital tail of these videos—which Instagram fails to properly moderate based on its own promises to crack down on this content—means the women in them are subjected to harassment long after they manage to get away from the man in real life. "Combined with the fact that 93.3% of these posts left comments open, subjects were frequently exposed to a digital afterlife of crude, abusive, and misogynistic commentary from the platform audience," the researchers wrote. "Comments frequently framed women’s rejection or discomfort as unnecessarily dismissive, including remarks such as 'she was acting rude' or suggestions that women should 'at least acknowledge' the men approaching them, while others minimised harassment by arguing that people who label such behaviour as harassment are contributing to declining birth rates."
This isn't a new issue, and it is a societal issue. These glasses are only making it easier, and far more public.
Which means the two of them are basically running a version of Moneyball, in real life, from opposite dugouts. One’s the old scout who swears he can see it in a kid and can’t fully say how. The other’s building the model that writes down what the scouts could never articulate.
The movie is more honest about how this works than most AI takes are. While the model won that argument, it never made the scouts worthless. It made the good ones more valuable and the vague ones expendable.
Developers who know how to build complex systems with good bones and good architecture aren't going to be replaced by AI. Companies that make this mistake will later learn to regret it. Eventually the bill of vibe coding without the underlying knowledge will come due.
Looking at what Dan says about handling judgement and the decisions taken can be helpful as an exercise to look back on to review your work.
The act of writing it down does more than just move your judgment. In the end, it actually sharpens it. Forced to explain why you make a decision, you find the rules you didn’t know you followed, and the ones you thought you followed but never really did.
But AI and LLMs still can't replace everything that goes into developing the knowledge you have that went into the making the decision.
A model trained on everything you’ve written knows what you did. It does not know the feel you developed for when to break your own rules. You never wrote that down, because you can’t. That part still transfers the old way, the reps, the proximity, the wax-on.
The final comment is 👨🏼🍳👌🏻.
A cover band can learn your setlist note for note. It still can’t tell you which song to play when the room goes quiet, and neither can anyone you didn’t bother to teach.
It’s also backed up by the fact that new bookstores keep opening at a rate that defies the end-of-reading narrative. According to the American Booksellers Association’s annual report at the end of 2025, 605 bookstore businesses (basically, any store whose primary goal is to sell books, be they pop-ups, online stores, or traditional storefronts) opened last year, compared to just 65 that closed. The number of new stores is up 87 percent from the same metric in 2024.
I'm fortunate to live right by two independent bookstores and love it. I know new ones have been opening nearby.
Talk to enough booksellers and you’ll find that it’s nearly impossible to square their experience with the despair about the state of reading that these pieces often leave you with. Matt and Megan Bormet opened People’s Book in Takoma Park, Md., in 2023, and shared a bit with me about what they’ve experienced since then. “We opened our store three years ago and had no idea whether anyone would show up when we opened our doors,” Matt said. “We sold about 60,000 books last year (for context, that’s three times the population of our city), and I really don’t know what I’m doing.” He told me later, “We just filled a very obvious need in the community, and people started knocking the doors down.”
I can think of worse things one could spend their money on.
Greg Kornbluh, who opened Downbound Books in Cincinnati in 2019, told me a story that spoke to this particularly well. “Nearly two years ago we started our first book club here, and we gave it a pretty specific remit: Anti-Despair Book Club," he said. "The idea was to pick books—both fiction and non—that would do more than just distract or comfort, but that could actually provide some tools or models for how to face the hardships and alienation of our times.
I'd go to a book club that did this.
It’s not fair that newer writers will have to prove (to a larger extent than more established writers) that they can actually write, and that what they’ve written is actually their own work, not the result of a prompt. It’s especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write — I’m looking at you, Microsoft and Google — are frantically stuffing “AI” tools into the programs writers rely on. No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to “help me write” in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to “help me write” in Google Docs. The very fact these “AI”s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a provenance standpoint. These “AI” tools are making it harder for all writers in this regard, not easier.
As someone who writes for my site, as well as trying my hand at a novel, this kind of scares me. I write all my posts in markdown, and I've gone back and forth between writing my novel in markdown or LibreOffice. None of my tools have AI assitants or AI tooling built in, which is what I want, but anyone reading or judging my writing won't necessarily know that. Newer authors are going to have to find a way to prove to publishers and the world that they wrote it themselves. It's not something I look forward to.
Therefore, if you take a step back, it's basically Meta getting to write the standards for child safety across the big players of the internet.
And if you don't believe that Meta has been particularly good, like what amazes me of the people celebrating this are the same people who are like Meta is terrible and we don't trust them.
And now you have handed them the pen to write the rules of how internet safety for children works across the internet.
And even if you say, well, it's just limited to these biggest players, if they can convince YouTube and TikTok to go along with it, the trickle down of this is also really problematic because now what is happening is you've blessed these specific things, the two hour limit, the hidden likes, the things that we don't know whether or not they actually work.
But if any other platform wants to avoid getting sued in the future, the easiest thing to do is just say, well, we're doing the industry-wide standard as defined in this settlement between Meta and all of these states.
And so the way to reduce liability, if you're a company, a smaller company, an upstart trying to do something different, maybe you have an idea of how to actually protect children more.
That's now risky.
The easiest thing, the thing to do to reduce and avoid liability is to just go with the flow, take what Meta has agreed to and say, we're just going to do that because that is the industry standard.
And that really concerns me, especially when we don't know what actually works right now.
The laws of unintended consequences is likely to be seen heavily here. Sadly, Meta is probably going to love this. It puts them in the driver seat to put walls up making it harder for new players to enter the market.
Standardized APIs have intrinsic value, independently of browser implementations.
We think of polyfills as a toggle: use a polyfill, leave it in there, and later when all browsers implement the feature natively, it gets removed.
This misses out on one of the biggest benefits of polyfills: decoupling API design from implementation.
Completely agree. It's nice when you can easily enhance functionality while not tying yourself to a specific implementation too tightly. Time moves on, implementations become standard across the different browsers, and you can go in and get rid of code. It's a great feeling.
It can also help handle things if a library ceases being maintained, or a vulnerability of some form is found in the polyfill library, or anything else. The easier things are to swap out implementations in general, the better.