It's a little shameful but I still struggle when centering divs on a page. Yes, I know about flexbox for more than a decade but always have to search to remember how it is done.
So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.
No shame in that. I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers.
They don't think like graphic designers, or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. It's not meant to be generated.
If there is some person for whom CSS layout comes naturally, I have not met them. As far as I can tell their design goal was to confuse everyone, at which they succeeded magnificently.
> 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.
Hah, centering divs with flexbox is one of my uses for this too! I can never remember the syntax off the top of my head, but if I say "center it with flexbox" it spits out exactly the right code every time.
If I do this a few more times it might even stick in my head.
Try tailwind. Very amenable to LLM generation since it's effectively a micro language, and being colocated with the document elements, it doesn't need a big context to zip together.
I did that a lot initially, it’s really only with the advent of Claude Code integrated with VS Code that I’m learning more like I would learn from a code review.
It also depends on the project. Work code gets a lot more scrutiny than side projects, for example.
Or, given that OP is presumably a developer who just doesn't focus fully on front end code they could skip straight to checking MDN for "center div" and get a How To article (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/How_to/Layo...) as the first result without relying on spicy autocomplete.
Given how often people acknowledge that ai slop needs to be verified, it seems like a shitty way to achieve something like this vs just checking it yourself with well known good reference material.
ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed.
Or:
ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.
A little hypothesis: a lot of .Net and Java stuff is mainlined from a giant mega corp straight to developers through a curated certification, MVP, blogging, and conference circuit apparatus designed to create unquestioned corporate friendly, highly profitable, dogma. You say ‘website’ and from the letter ‘b’ they’re having a Pavlovian response (“Azure hosted SharePoint, data lake, MSSQL, user directory, analytics, PowerBI, and…”).
Microsoft’s dedication to infusing OpenAI tech into everything seems like a play to cut even those tepid brains out of the loop and capture the vehicles of planning and production. Training your workforce to be dependent on third-party thinking, planning, and advice is an interesting strategy.
This is currently negative expected value over the lifetime of any hardware you can buy today at a reasonable price, which is basically a monster Mac - or several - until Apple folds and rises the price due to RAM shortages.
$2000 will get you 30~50 tokens/s on perfectly usable quantization levels (Q4-Q5), taken from any one among the top 5 best open weights MoE models. That's not half bad and will only get better!
If you are running lightweight models like deepseek 32B. But anything more and it’ll drop. Also, costs have risen a lot in the last month for RAM and AI adjacent hardware. It’s definitely not 2k for the rig needed for 50 tokens a second
Could you explain how? I can't seem to figure it out.
DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has 37B active parameters, GLM-4.7 and Kimi K2 have 32B active parameters.
Lets say we are dealing with Q4_K_S quantization for roughly half the size, we still need to move 16 GB 30 times per second, which requires a memory bandwidth of 480 GB/s, or maybe half that if speculative decoding works really well.
Anything GPU-based won't work for that speed, because PCIe 5 provides only 64 GB/s and $2000 can not afford enough VRAM (~256GB) for a full model.
That leaves CPU-based systems with high memory bandwidth. DDR5 would work (somewhere around 300 GB/s with 8x 4800MHz modules), but that would cost about twice as much for just the RAM alone, disregarding the rest of the system.
Can you get enough memory bandwidth out of DDR4 somehow?
Look up AMD's Strix Halo mini-PC such as GMKtec's EVO-X2. I got the one with 128GB of unified RAM (~100GB VRAM) last year for 1900€ excl. VAT; it runs like a beast especially for SOTA/near-SOTA MoE models.
Just you wait until the powers that be take cars away from us! What absolute FOOLS you all are to shape your lives around something that could be taken away from us at any time! How are you going to get to work when gas stations magically disappear off the face of the planet? I ride a horse to work, and y'all are idiots for developing a dependency on cars. Next thing you're gonna tell me is we're going to go to war for oil to protect your way of life.
Definitely. Right now I can access and use them for free without significant annoyance. I'm a canary for enshittification; I'm curious what it's going to look like.
We already had that happen. When GPT 5 was released, it was much less sycophantic. All the sad people with AI girl/boyfriends threw a giant fit because OpenAI "murdered" the "soul" of their "partner". That's why 4o is still available as a legacy model.
I can absolutely see that happening. It's already kind of happened to me a couple of times when I found myself offline and was still trying to work on my local app. Like any addiction, I expect it to cost me some money in the future
If only it were that easy. I got really good at centering and aligning stuff, but only when the application is constructed in the way I expect. This is usually not a problem as I'm usually working on something I built myself, but if I need to make a tweak to something I didn't build, I frequently find myself frustrated and irritated, especially when there is some higher or lower level that is overriding the setting I just added.
As a bonus, I pay attention to what the AI did and its results, and I have actually learned quite a bit about how to do this myself even without AI assistance
So instead of refreshing that less used knowledge I just ask the AI to do it for me. The implications of this vs searching MDN Docs is another conversation to have.