I emphatically disagree with the premise. Sometimes high performance comes from focusing on the small picture of just what needs done today. Or just what you want to do today. Or what you can do today.
The big picture does matter. Priority does matter. So this UX has a valid use case. But that use case is about making sure things progress and you don't utterly forget something important.
Also, this quote: "Other apps push you to get more done."
Again, big disagree. My to do list doesn't push me, it is a just a list. Even the management of my property (which is large because I own a forest, wetlands, some small ag, outbuildings, and the actual home), which I run on a Kanban board doesn't push me. It just organizes it without a timeline. If anything, this app is far more pushy than anything I do today.
In other words, this really smells like one person's personal organization style. If they find other people with the same style, they may find a market, but I suspect they will instead find that there is a reason that seemingly every coder has at one time or anther written their own To Do app. Because everyone wants something different.
Soon to learn the lesson of "If you build your company in a way that you are 100% dependent on an outside vendor, a day will come when you fail because that vendor changes something."
I've been working with government entities for document management for 15 years now, writing software that does exactly what we are talking about - versioning, tracking, publishing legislative records both through the authoring and approval cycles and then to the public. I have not worked at the federal level, but with small government - school districts, small towns etc.
Those years tell me 2 things:
1) Yes, absolutely version control for legislation is critical.
2) That doesn't mean Git is the right answer.
Since I don't work at the federal level, I don't know what system they use, but I do know that their workflow is already based on specific changes - they will write up the changes to a document, then apply the changes and publish a new document. Those documents are posted on congress.gov. So they do have a versioning workflow and public accessibility, just not the same style as software devs are used to. I'm sure it could be improved, but I'm not sure forcing them into our working style is the right answer.
The real goal here is not "Use Git". That is an implementation detail, and one that has also been presented and discussed quite a bit in my niche of the industry. Mostly, it is unwanted. Or was unwanted the last time the discussion went around. Git makes sense to software engineers, but not to the general public, and not to any of the document authors I've worked with. Maybe we can add a UX layer to fix that, but that isn't the bigger point...
What we want is to work towards the actual goals: For the tracking to be more detailed, with more transparency including not only authorship of the change, but the source of the change. And presumably, some commentary as to why the change was made. Then all of that should be available to the public.
If git works as a data structure that supports a solution that meets those goals, fine. I'm not anti-git. But when designing solutions, we need to start from the goals of the system, not the data layer. And we need to design solutions that the document authors will actually use, not force them to work like us.
I wrote something similar, but I had a different take on it. I let you paste in the text, then it steps you through breaking it apart, helping you to determine what each bit of text was, and a drag/drop UI to diagram it. But I approached it with a deliberate zero-AI approach. The idea is that careful reading of text is a skill, and many people are losing it. So I wanted to provide a playground for people to practice it.
I also figured that people who write badly might see what is wrong with their writing when a diagram shows just how off their words really are. My teenagers think that the resulting diagrams would be a brutal yet effective way to combat the misinformation online.
In any case, I wrote it. But then I stopped because I wasn't sure where to really take it. But it feels a bit validating to know that I'm not alone in seeing the value of breaking down written text.
It is almost like LLMs have gotten over their initial tells and now the tell is that they write these walls of text. This article reads just like the walls of text that my coworkers at one of my gigs paste all over the place. Any single sentence looks OK, but the overall wall has no flow. No cadence. No difference in tone between stating facts and drawing conclusions. Headers, lists, and charts thrown in for variety.
I'm not sure - maybe humans can write like this, too. But it is the written equivalent of a monotone voice, and I find it very difficult to keep enough attention to read such articles, regardless of their authorship.
This is the same answer as growing a for-profit product. You need to stop spraying random marketing attempts, and look deeper at who uses it today, and why. What problem does it solve for them? Who else has that problem, and where does that audience actually spend time - both IRL and online. Then you craft a message that clearly and concisely show them that you understand their problem and have a solution available, and you share that message in the specific locations that your specific audience knows and trusts.
Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?
I published a magazine for a few years. Off the top of my head:
- publishing is fucking hard. Early on, you need a constant stream of dependable writers who do not value their time. Later on, you have a constant stream of writers but have to figure out who will make you hate your life the least.
- good writers are flaky and they always have options. A little less than half of good pitches get published. 100% of good pitches take work.
- there is a difference between good and dependable writers. Early on, you need dependable even though each one eats a lot of time. Layer on, you need good. You won’t know when to switch until your readers tell you that you suck. Then it’s too late to save your publication.
- I published before generative AI was possible but at each stage of popularity, I dealt with more PR shit bags. Add in generative AI and I’m not sure my naïveté would have survived as long as it did.
- at its best, publishing is a very expensive way to harm yourself. Back in the day, Jim Rose would have paid me to fuck myself up in equivalent ways. Naïveté convinces you that you’re changing the world through self flagellation, but when that’s gone you’re just beating the shit out of yourself.
- my co-founder handled editorial and I handled publishing. The gap between them is so massive that we really needed double the headcount. Alas, publishing is totally fucked so our budget was so low that we needed slave labour yet couldn’t even afford the slave in the first place. Without the editorial/publication divide, I would have had a heart attack five years before I did.
- there’s this thing in publishing called the trough of zero ideas. You won’t believe it’s possible in the beginning but it will hit you hard. It’s not so much there aren’t ideas; it’s that you’re tired and ideas stop feeling good… they feel like work because they are.
- in publishing it’s really easy to come up with business models. Unfortunately, every single business model requires consistently exceptional content, a reality distortion field and a lot of hand holding.
- all those membership plans etc will be invaded by sales or PR fucks as soon as you launch them. $25 a month makes a lot of people feel entitled to explain your dreams to you.
Edit - This sounds very negative and it is… but I want to publish again.
No, but is it a reasonable assumption to think it is Zero? Or that the upkeep is Zero too? No.
The blogpost literally says he's making this his full time job. What's reasonable is to ask how that will pan out. And to, after answering oneself, tell the relevant party to be weary of it.
I can only assume DO took a bath on this. Buying CSS Tricks from Coyier to largely sit on it silently before rolling it back off the books seems like a terrible investment strategy.
Attract an audience of people who make purchasing decisions, then attract sponsors who want to be put in front of those people. Quality of readers is more important than quantity.
You're saying that like it's straightforward hard work. But that strategy has been on the decline for years, with no sign of reversing. High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers. Sometimes the LLMs are searching the web, but LLMs approximately never click on the ads.
I didn't say "easy" either, I said "straightforward hard work."
What you're doing is hard work, but it's way more straightforward than building out CSS Tricks.
You're a successful marathon runner. CSS Tricks will have to run a marathon with both legs tied together.
What makes your subject matter (LLMs) work is that it's a very fast moving topic, much faster moving than CSS, so people come to you for news.
Plus, it's difficult to test new models effectively, so people are looking for trusted names to do meta analysis, fast. Is the new OpenAI model better than Claude? Better how? Quality of output? Evaluated how? Even comparing prices can be difficult, as different models (at different settings) can generate different numbers of tokens (and different numbers of cached tokens) for the same tasks.
None of that applies to CSS Tricks.
CSS fundamentally can't move that fast, as long as changes in CSS require Apple, Google, and Mozilla to all agree on standards. Hardly anybody needs to know about the latest CSS news. Mostly you only need to know about Baseline Widely Available CSS features, which are at least 30 months old by definition. And when you do learn about new CSS features, it's usually pretty obvious (either to you or to an LLM) whether those new CSS features apply to something you're working on.
It's going to be very, very hard to keep CSS Tricks alive, even with a lot of hard work.
Something can be both simple to execute and extremely difficult to execute well. Simple and easy are not synonymous.
> High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers.
You're right, but the high-value audiences are also looking at the sources the LLMs cite, guiding the LLMs to use specific source and exclude others (even if it's just "eschew blogspam and listicles" in the prompt). So being one of those sources is still valuable. Perhaps less so, but it's not without value.
I know 2. That is out of the 3 people that I live with. Sure, this household is probably an outlier, but I think people inside the tech bubble do not realize the depth of the anti-AI sentiment from outside the bubble.
From the HN Guidelines: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
You've now posted this 3 different times in the last couple days.
You still tell people to download a zip and run that code. And on some other page you linked from your github it says to enter your AI key.
An OS doesn't need to be downloaded and run in Windows. This continues to be sketch AF.
The big picture does matter. Priority does matter. So this UX has a valid use case. But that use case is about making sure things progress and you don't utterly forget something important.
Also, this quote: "Other apps push you to get more done."
Again, big disagree. My to do list doesn't push me, it is a just a list. Even the management of my property (which is large because I own a forest, wetlands, some small ag, outbuildings, and the actual home), which I run on a Kanban board doesn't push me. It just organizes it without a timeline. If anything, this app is far more pushy than anything I do today.
In other words, this really smells like one person's personal organization style. If they find other people with the same style, they may find a market, but I suspect they will instead find that there is a reason that seemingly every coder has at one time or anther written their own To Do app. Because everyone wants something different.
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