Agreed for cheaper prices and more flexibility. At least this is what we think we want. But do we actually want it ?
A computer 40 years ago was way more expensive than now. How did people do it ? They managed. How do we do it now ? We manage, similarly.
Was there an improvement in things ? Obviously, computers are more powerful for example. But with less powerful computers, people could also be happy I believe.
I remember 15 years ago, tech has obviously evolved a lot since then, and I have learned to use more and more tech tools. But am I more efficient than then ? Happier than back then ? More skilled than back then ?
- More efficient for some things, less efficient for others.
- Happier ? no. Not sadder either, similar. If anything, it's not related.
- More Skilled ? No. Skilled at other things. For example my handwriting is still ok but I believe I won't be able to write so much or so quickly or so well as I used to (I should try though).
Am I saying that progress is not real ? No, of course not. Progress happens. But is it what "people" want or need ? Taking my own perspective : if it happens (and it does), I adapt - no problem.
If it does not happen somehow - then I would adapt too. That's what we do.
> 2026 tools to write their code but they want to be judged by 2016 standards.
That's basically the entire AI landscape atm.
I keep seeing people do things like spend a weekend building a product then charging ridiculous prices for it with the justification that it's what those products would've cost a few years ago.
For some reason, it doens't click for them that those prices were a reflection of the effort it took to get to that point and that the situation has changed.
Ok, this article is basically about htmx, and htmx style web dev rather than being about front-end dev as a whole.
I get why people like it, and I think it might even have it's place as a niche, but my main problem is that it's an awkward middle ground. If we say component based frameworks (react, vue, svelte) are too heavy, then we can still go a step further and say that htmx isn't necessary for a lot of plain static sites that need some reactivity.
Vanilla js with fetch, getElementById, innerText, is 99% of what people need for these types of simple sites.
> Vanilla js with fetch, getElementById, innerText, is 99% of what people need for these types of simple sites.
But it's not only for simple sites. Don't underestimate the power of, say, a SSE stream using brotli compression: this can stream a shitload of data for serious apps (like real-time financial data).
Resource usage on the client-side is also close to nil with a SSE stream and minimal JavaScript and on the server-side it hardly changes anything: that data was going to be sent to the front-end one way or another anyway.
And if you take something like DOM morphing and, say, Datastar: it's not conceptually that different from React. The DOM reconciliation doesn't happen at the same place and not in exactly the same manner, but it's not entirely dissimilar IMO.
It's not just htmx: there's are different projects and, interestingly IMO, developers from many different languages who are now beginning to tackle this problem of Javascript (way too) heavy frameworks.
In my (small) experience, SSE is a bit finicky: 1) Firefox kills a webpage's SSE connection when you close and open the laptop lid, making you write code to reconnect, unlike other browsers; 2) there's no way to see the HTTP status code if something went wrong; 3) proxies can still mess things up sometimes: https://dev.to/miketalbot/server-sent-events-are-still-not-p...
If you have a constant stream of data, SSE does make sense. But if your goal is to have events arriving infrequently or a irregular times, then good old long polling will work in strictly more cases, at the cost of maybe 2x more resources.
I've worked on design tools for the last few years.
This article is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the design space, and figma as a company.
Just a few of my thoughts:
- Figma was always about building a successful company over a successful product. Figma started with a much more ambitious aspiration, and had the ability to deliver through talent like Evan Wallace. A lot of it started with showing how capable webgl was in the browser. And yet, a lot of things like 3d features don't exist because they had the awareness to really hone in and focus on building a specific thing that made them money because everybody in the company ended up with an expensive seat price.
- Seriously, Figma is a company that's about design tool second, and about getting a product that businesses use first. To that end, it's already succeeded through the IPO, subsequently, who knows what the market is going to look like. Figma having a war chest is in many ways much better than having a technically impressive demo that might evaporate.
- People at Figma, 100%, know everything in this article. And not just figma people, like anybody and everybody that's tried to build a design tool has had these thoughts. It's very obvious that ui/ux is the interesection of design/dev/pm. It's also very obvious that it should stick close to the source of truth, to something like code.
- The problem is, that it's almost underselling it to say that it's MASSIVE challenge to execute on these ideas because of how easily it bleeds into building not just a design tool, but a coding, data management, architecture, etc. tool
- I could talk at length about all the challenges and potential solutions, but that's neither here nor there.
- On AI, I guess other people's guess is as good as mine, but my gut feeling is that while data is important, SOTA AI is generalist enough that the base models, the thinking they're able to do, is better than having a lot of custom data. Especially because ui design is front-facing - you can just scour the web in contrast to private financial documents, or legal documents for example.
That last sentence didn't make sense so I'm not sure what your point is. But I'll run with the analogy.
You got into a taxi and they were charging you horse carriage prices initially. They're still not charging you for a full taxi ride but people are complaining because their (mistaken) assumption was that taxis can be provided as cheaply as horse carriages.
People are angry because their expectations were not managed properly which I understand.
But many of us realized that $20 or even $200 was far too low for such advanced capabilities and are not that surprised that all of the companies are raising prices and decreasing usage limits.
OpenAI is not far behind, they're simply taking their time because they're okay with burning through capital more quickly than Anthropic is, and because OpenAI's clearly stated ambition is to win market share, not to be a responsibly, sustainably run company.
Shortly after I ran out of credits in 15 min, they tweeted that they increased usage limits to compensate for the higher token usage, so perhaps it is not as bad now.
Codex, this afternoon, I was able to use for like two hours on the $20 plan. Maybe limits will be tighter in the future. But with new data centers, new GPU generations, and research advances it might rather get cheaper.
Anyway, as you said, this is all pretty cheap. I'll go with the $100 Codex plan, since I now figured out how to nicely work on multiple changes in parallel via the Codex app with worktrees. I imagine the same is possible in Claude Code.
It seems to me a bit naive to think OpenAI would not increase prices/decrease usage limits at some point. $20 might cover a very small fraction of the actual cost that is incurred over a month of sustained usage.
> This comment thread is a good learner for founders;
lmao, no they shouldn't.
Public sentiment, especially on reactionary mediums like social media should be taken with a huge grain of salt. I've seen overwhelming negativity for products/companies, only for it it completely dissapear, or be entirely wrong.
It's like that meme showing members of a steam group that are boycotting some CoD game, and you can see that a bunch of them were playing in-game of the very thing they forsook.
The internet is a stupid place with people who can't make up their mind, I don't disagree :)
But this isn't like a minor debacle about a brand. The flagship product had a severe degradation, and the parent company won't be forthcoming about it.
It's short term thinking. Congratulations, everyone still uses your product for now, but it diluted your brand.
Why take the risk when the alternative is so incredibly easily? Build engagement with your users and enjoy your loyal army.
It's somewhat counterintuitive, but the added complexity leads to simpler projects that are easier to maintain long term. I have simple markdown files, and a separate, code-based conversion process that works well for me.
Also the documentation for eleventy was always confusing to me. I almost got the impression that "it's so simple, we don't have to explain it". Whereas astro's documentation is much more accesible; there were a handful of cases where there was something I wanted to do and astro had an example of exactly that. I didn't have to do guesswork, just follow the examples in the way the creators intended. Stuff like that is important.
Astro is very nice, but I kinda feel like they are adding a lot of features I don't want and will never need. It's starting to feel too fancy for SSG. My first time using it I encountered 3 separate bugs with their compiler. The fanciness has a price.
Astro is great, and easily extensible just by looking at the code and existing extensions too. Highly recommend it. Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.
> Having the islands of actual react stuff is incredibly useful as well.
I've tried multiple times to come up with usecases where they are worth it, but still haven't found any. The only theoretical examples are things where you wouldn't be using Astro in thr first place, like real-time document collaboration or something.
Curious what you've found them so useful for. Besides just preferring React syntax to HTML+TS I guess? But again that seems to go against the point of using Astro.
Well I have a static site generated with Astro that includes parts that still use dynamic react stuff, for example an interactive dashboard / slideshow kind of thing and interactive widgets. The data is baked into the static site but I still wanted the rich interactivity from react in certain places. It naturally grew from an Astro project that didn't need any react stuff, so it was a logical and simple step to add it in the few places it was needed.
I've got slideshows and interactive calculators and things and it all works fine without the islands, that's the thing. LLMs will just incorrectly pattern match "interactivity = React".
Astro is great, and is what I prefer on new “static-y” projects (for more dynamic stuff, SvelteKit).
But 11ty really was so much simpler if all you need is to put together some templates, and don’t want to deal with component stuff. That said, the docs really are lacking in some parts.
> Europe and the Gulf diversifying both their investments and defense purchases.
With what? The euro, yuan? Or weapons from france?
I hate to admit it, but it's much less that the US is great because it's the reserve currency, and much more that the world reserve currency is the dollar because the US is what it is.
Weapons are expensive, and it only makes sense to buy them from a country that specializes in them. And a country that makes weapons at huge scale is likely to be big enough tilt the direction of the country to be all the ugly things the modern US military industrial complex is.
The US isn't delivering Patriot missiles to Switzerland. Switzerland froze paiements. The US unilaterally took the money Switzerland escrowed to buy F35s, put them towards paying for Patriot missiles they won't deliver, and asked Switzerland to refill the F35 escrow account. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been siphoned off.
I'm having trouble reconciling this comment with reports that US stockpiles are already being depleted by the Iran war. At this point the US weapons production seems relatively specialized and inefficient, not "huge scale." Someone more informed care to weigh in?
Raytheon is about half the size of Pepsico, with about the same profit margin.
The supposed "Military Industrial Complex" that Ike warned about died years later, and the end of the Cold War buried what little remained. The F-35 is basically the only big military construction project we've had in a very long time, and it comes at a few hundred airframes per year.
In WW2, we were producing 10k+ rather advanced airframes every single year. In each category.
The company that designed and built the M1 Abrams Tank doesn't really exist anymore for example. We, like Russia, might not really have a capability of building 4000 hulls in a short timeframe, which is table stakes if we are actually concerned about a war with China. We were able to do these things back in WW2 because we, through central planning (not a free market), reorganized like 1/20th of the economy into building war assets. FDR decreed that we build 120k Shermans. We eventually managed 50k.
A lot of the supposed "graft" and pork of the defense industry is about giving it a lot of leeway just to stick around. Once you lose domain knowledge it's gone forever, you have to expend considerable resources to rebuild and recollect it. No, documentation doesn't count. Reading all of our notes hasn't fixed the fact that Russia and China can't build the exceptional jet engines we can.
I don’t think central planning is the only factor. Ukraine is leading a massively heroic drone innovation effort with very good results. In 2026 there are internet blackouts in Russia to hide the social chaos created by 1000+ drone strikes daily in deep Russian territory. It’s not a centrally planned war effort in Ukraine. It’s dozens of startups which started in people’s basements and bombed out ruins. The main factor is not central planning, but rather an existential threat which forced a massively heroic war effort.
> A lot of the supposed "graft" and pork of the defense industry is about giving it a lot of leeway just to stick around.
Even if they stick around, will they maintain an edge? Seems like their incentives are similar to a professor on tenure - do the minimum, collect paycheck. Even if they are still creating cutting-edge weapons, could they scale up efficiently when needed? Just read Casey Handmer's extremely critical posts on Orion/SLS; I would not trust the side of Lockheed/Boeing he describes with critical national security capabilities.
I’m probably not more informed, but it seems to me that it can be both. The rate of expenditure in a medium-sized war will far outstrip peacetime production needs. Even if you’re arming half the planet’s militaries, your peacetime production rate will be much smaller than what’s being used now, even if you’re building a lot by non-wartime standards.
Ukraine butchers soldiers for cheap. The US drops a bomb through the Atatollah’s bedroom window for not-cheap. It’s not clear to me which is more cost effective in the end. (Ignoring for a moment that US strategy in this war seems to be nonexistent. Imagine these capabilities were being used with some actual goal in mind besides “if we take their king then we win.”)
There is a big difference between defending against an unprovoked invasion vs assassinating an unsuspecting target.
Ukraine has shown themselves very capable of surgical offensive strikes using cheap drones deep inside enemy territory , so your comparison is not valid.
The US is defaulting on military orders to Europe and Germany just announced a 1 trillion euro rearmament plan. Europe is manufacturing big time. The Gulf states as of yesterday are now buying from Ukraine for fucks sake.
> "If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
For the record, Petrov made this decision based on a false assumption that the US wouldn't launch just a few missiles, but would instead send a lot, all at once. Except, that one of the US plans was to send a few missiles to destroy critical targets, and then follow it up with a large scale attack.
Petrov himself said that he might've acted differently if he was aware of this possibility. And even then, his initial hestitancy was basically a 50/50 gamble.
An AI would basically do the same thing if asked - just roll a random number, and launch nukes below a threshold, adjust threshold based on some llm evaluation of the situation if needed.
It's why every integration basically tries to piggyback off of a subscription, and why Anthropic has to continuously play whack-a-mole trying to shut those services down.
People don't care about the tech, they care about the second-order effects like cheaper prices, and more flexibility.
Also, the article is way too broad, you can't treat automation and it's applications in law along with just "vibes" about how people feel about AI.
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