Tbh I can't see how any site about tooling doesn't go the way of Stack Overflow. I used to follow the latest framework and CSS articles avidly. With agents it's a moot point.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
I think this assumes AI needs the same kinds of “tricks” humans do.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
I am concerned that what will happen to detailed technical write ups that defined much of the "technical internet space"? There used to be "CodeProject" (still is around probably) that used to have great articles on C, Windows Programming, Windows System programming and what not. Similar other sources on Web as well such as some TutPlus network.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
> Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so...
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
Because being friendly works doesn't work. Open source maintainers have been screaming about funding for years. One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
In this case CSS-Tricks got paid $4m first, so probably the wrong entity to be complaining about funding. But maybe the lead editor in question who’s not the creator didn’t see much of that?
Got acquired => got paid. CSS-Tricks the entity (up to the point of acquisition) got paid the money. If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn’t seem be public info.
"people you do like" in this case refers to a website that DigitalOcean owns.
"people you don't like" is a singular (racist) guy who slapped a bunch of scripts on top of Arch and somehow receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
He seems concerned about vagrancy and "shitting in the bushes" rather than the race (Is gypsy even a race?) of people doing it.
Going way back up to what was said above however, if you want funds for css-tricks, complaining about omarchy getting funded is just dumb. Funding tends to go to things that are growing. Omarchy is growing fast. It's going to get funded. If you're not growing, you starve. That's just how capitalism appears to operate.
Based on comments here, it sounds like css-tricks founder got paid and didn't care anymore so the product withered, hence no further funding to be expected.
Gotta say, given the list of security issues that continue to be found in Omarchy, if I were an enterprising explorer, I'd be probing for shopify employees running Omarchy.
Tailwind is basically already EOL in its functional inability to support newer CSS features. Both of these projects seemed like the creator being fine with getting out with a nice paycheck, and that's ok by me, although it's unfortunate DO lied about how it would handle CSS Tricks going forward, and generally abandoned the tech writing aspect it was initially known for.
Almost all magazines go though an arc of success, plateau and decline. Audiences and writers move on or retire.
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
> Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
> A set of scripts and configurations which are led by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). Previously of Ruby on Rails fame, but now of Omarchy notoriety and far-right, racist infamy.
Sorry to say, but if you consider him "far-right" and "racist" for saying things that were considered completely uncontroversial and common sense some ~15 years ago, you are the one who is far-left.
Wow, Omarchy is hot right now. Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop. Good on Digital Ocean for making such a substantial commitment.
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
Omarchy is a highly opinionated distro. For example I remember DHH falling in love with alacritty a few minutes after switching from being a Mac hardcore user-evangelist (Mac users were furious in Twitter!). Now alacritty is in Omarchy as one of the four terminals available.
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".
> Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop.
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
Aren't all Linux distros ultimately a bunch of scripts on top of the Linux kernel? Compiled scripts, but scripts none the less. If someone made a bash compiler maybe that would help. Reminds me of when I used to compile DOS batch files to .com executables back in the day to make my work look more important lol
Getting linux to work flawlessly on M Macs is "just a bunch of scripts"? Wow. Since when tech folks judge the open-source projects so harsh and so much just after they only started?
On the off chance this isn't just trolling: Getting linux to work on M-series Macs was a ton of work and basically none of it was done by the folks behind Omarchy. Exactly the point being made in this argument and elsewhere is that the funding would be better off going to the people who really did the hard parts of that work (e.g. Ashai developers among others)
The more relevant post is by Geoff himself.
https://geoffgraham.me/why-css-tricks-has-been-quiet/
Tbh I can't see how any site about tooling doesn't go the way of Stack Overflow. I used to follow the latest framework and CSS articles avidly. With agents it's a moot point.
It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.
That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."
If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.
Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.
Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
I think this assumes AI needs the same kinds of “tricks” humans do.
Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.
So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.
Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.
https://janetdocs.org/ is growing pretty fast, but that's because the community's forging an anti-AI niche of fun hobby coding.
I am concerned that what will happen to detailed technical write ups that defined much of the "technical internet space"? There used to be "CodeProject" (still is around probably) that used to have great articles on C, Windows Programming, Windows System programming and what not. Similar other sources on Web as well such as some TutPlus network.
Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?
PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.
> Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so...
It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.
FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.
The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(
Went to readonly mode in 2024
> it's not just an anti AI rant, it's a genuine open question
There will probably still be some passionate people dedicated to this kind of thing, but presumably not as many, which is unfortunate.
Complaining that they give money to people you don't like is not a good look when you want them to give money to people you do like.
Because being friendly works doesn't work. Open source maintainers have been screaming about funding for years. One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?
You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.
"One dude" that has been one of the lead and most well known contributors to open source for decades now.
In this case CSS-Tricks got paid $4m first, so probably the wrong entity to be complaining about funding. But maybe the lead editor in question who’s not the creator didn’t see much of that?
CSS-Tricks didn't get paid $4m. They got acquired. The previous owner of CSS-Tricks got $4m.
Got acquired => got paid. CSS-Tricks the entity (up to the point of acquisition) got paid the money. If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn’t seem be public info.
It wasn't divided.
"people you do like" in this case refers to a website that DigitalOcean owns. "people you don't like" is a singular (racist) guy who slapped a bunch of scripts on top of Arch and somehow receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
I think it’s a very good look when the people you complain about are racists.
"People you don't like" is a great euphemism for racists
That does seem to be the definition that many people base their use of that word on.
No it isn't
not in this context, though?
In this case you can judge for yourself if it's an overreaction. https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
Wow. You can make your own conclusions, but my money is not exactly going to flow into DigitalOcean's pocket in the near future.
Holy shit, that blog post was insane. He's clearly a racist twat.
He seems concerned about vagrancy and "shitting in the bushes" rather than the race (Is gypsy even a race?) of people doing it.
Going way back up to what was said above however, if you want funds for css-tricks, complaining about omarchy getting funded is just dumb. Funding tends to go to things that are growing. Omarchy is growing fast. It's going to get funded. If you're not growing, you starve. That's just how capitalism appears to operate.
Based on comments here, it sounds like css-tricks founder got paid and didn't care anymore so the product withered, hence no further funding to be expected.
The writing quality definitely dropped after the acquisition. It's a shame, CSS-Tricks taught me so much early on.
the title is really underselling it; as the post is very concise, i won't repeat it here but it's worth reading
Can’t the site be migrated to Astro/static and be hosted on CF/Vercel? It could be a great resource for LLMs
Perhaps just make it open source and static host it
TIL Chris Coyier sold CSS Tricks in 2022.
That's what going to happen to tailwind too after the acquisition.
Has Shopify given money to Omarchy too? Or more so because now Tailwind is owned by someone larger?
Tobi and DHH are like BFFs, and yes, they have.
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-... Founding member, donating a million dollars.
Gotta say, given the list of security issues that continue to be found in Omarchy, if I were an enterprising explorer, I'd be probing for shopify employees running Omarchy.
Tailwind is basically already EOL in its functional inability to support newer CSS features. Both of these projects seemed like the creator being fine with getting out with a nice paycheck, and that's ok by me, although it's unfortunate DO lied about how it would handle CSS Tricks going forward, and generally abandoned the tech writing aspect it was initially known for.
Why purchase a website, just to run it into the ground? I never understood this.
COVID happened. Money was aplenty. Then snapback happened. And there were many firings and cancelled projects.
There were a lot of products and ideas that felt great during ZIRP but stopped making sense post-ZIRP. That's my take.
what are people using instead of digital ocean now?
Hetzner + Coolify + BunnyCDN for the entire stack
I'm moving off Vercel / AWS. I kept DO for a Minecraft server for friends/family but that's dead.
I use Hetzner and Bunny too. What does Coolify do in this instance?
Github-to-production or similar autodeploy workflows, cert management, backups, monitoring, notifications, and other things.
Coolify's website [1] explains it better.
But for example, you can call a webhook once new resources have been created, so Coolify can push them to your CDN.
[1] https://coolify.io/
I switched over to vultr months ago, so far so good!
Hetzner
Hetzner. I like the company and how they operate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQeJYEN_lrg
Plus, it's an EU company. I don't want to rely on US hosting for my business.
Almost all magazines go though an arc of success, plateau and decline. Audiences and writers move on or retire.
I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.
> Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon
The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.
I would have been okay with this state of affairs if the Omarchy guy had good politics. But he has the bad politics so I’m outraged.
It’s really interesting tbf how you felt like defending a racist piece of shit by publicizing you view the world with less complexity than a toddler
few people ever miss an opportunity to kick DHH.
> A set of scripts and configurations which are led by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). Previously of Ruby on Rails fame, but now of Omarchy notoriety and far-right, racist infamy.
wild that some people still except someone else to side with their views just by pulling these entirely out of context in this year of the Lord
that's what happens when you put your whole ass out to the world
Sorry to say, DHH invites it.
Sorry to say, but if you consider him "far-right" and "racist" for saying things that were considered completely uncontroversial and common sense some ~15 years ago, you are the one who is far-left.
Immediate Tab-Closing when the author can't finish even half of an CSS article without ranting about evil conservatives ("far-right racist infamy").
Wow, Omarchy is hot right now. Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop. Good on Digital Ocean for making such a substantial commitment.
It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.
Omarchy is a highly opinionated distro. For example I remember DHH falling in love with alacritty a few minutes after switching from being a Mac hardcore user-evangelist (Mac users were furious in Twitter!). Now alacritty is in Omarchy as one of the four terminals available.
This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".
> Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop.
I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?
Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.
Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.
> Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?
Of course not but dhh makes it clear omarchy is not for everybody. And that’s all right.
Is this an article about CSS-Tricks or a hit piece on DHH? Hard to tell.
It's both. Fuck DHH.
Aren't all Linux distros ultimately a bunch of scripts on top of the Linux kernel? Compiled scripts, but scripts none the less. If someone made a bash compiler maybe that would help. Reminds me of when I used to compile DOS batch files to .com executables back in the day to make my work look more important lol
Getting linux to work flawlessly on M Macs is "just a bunch of scripts"? Wow. Since when tech folks judge the open-source projects so harsh and so much just after they only started?
On the off chance this isn't just trolling: Getting linux to work on M-series Macs was a ton of work and basically none of it was done by the folks behind Omarchy. Exactly the point being made in this argument and elsewhere is that the funding would be better off going to the people who really did the hard parts of that work (e.g. Ashai developers among others)