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But as much as this makes sense, I miss the days of meaningful class names and standalone (S)CSS. Done well, with BEM and the like, it creates a semantically meaningful "plugin infrastructure" on the frontend, where you write simple CSS scripts to play with tweaks, and those overrides can eventually become code, without needing to target "the second x within the third y of the z."
Not to mention that components become more easily scriptable as well. A component running on a production website becomes hackable in the same vein of why this is called Hacker News. And in trying to minimize tokens on greenfield code generation, we've lost that hackability, in a real way.
I'd recommend: tell your AGENTS.md to include meaningful classnames, even if not relevant to styling, in generated code. If you have a configurability system that lets you plug in CSS overrides or custom scripts, make the data from those configurations searchable by the LLM as well. Now you have all the tools you need to make your site deeply customizable, particularly when delivering private-labeled solutions to partners. It's far easier to build this in early, when you have context on the business meaning of every div, rather than later on. Somewhere, a GPU may sigh at generating a few extra tokens, but it's worthwhile.
Blog posts almost certainly helped. But dramatic shifts like these to favour newer tech indicates that there's some other factor in play.
I'm not expressing an opinion about that; it's a real question.
I'm not expressing an opinion about that, I don't do front end dev so I have no opinion, it's a real question.
CSS on its own is great, in a way, but also kind of awful if you don't fully grasp it. It used to be much worse, it got way better, but it still offers plenty of rough edges and foot guns.
Tailwind smooths some things over, but there are real tradeoffs. I prefer to use it quite often, but I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there. I don't think there's some perfect alternative hiding in obscurity, though. Tailwind is arguably popular because it often makes life easier. Not without drawbacks, but... I'd say it makes working on teams easier and there are a lot of community-generated themes, components, etc that make building things much faster and easier.
Hand rolled CSS is better if you're good at writing it, but in my experience, most people simply aren't.
Some people will disagree with me and say Tailwind is garbage, and that's fine, but they probably know CSS reasonably well. That makes a huge difference. Of the ~18M downloads per week, I would guess the vast majority of people using it have mostly copied and pasted stuff into their projects (or these days, let an LLM do it for them).
“I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there.”
Maybe there are use cases where performance of web-styling is critical, but it certainly isn’t in mine.
Plain old CSS will let you create optimal styling solutions for HTML documents, which is nice, but... How often is that actually necessary or even tangible for any end-user experience?
Anyone who needs better solutions is likely working in some scenario, on some team, where the problem of slow style recalculations or excessive payload sizes could be identified and resolved easily enough anyway. It's a trade-off, but the escape hatch is a few steps away.
is telling
didn't win... It won ...
Look at their other comments they are also fishy
I know you guys don't want us to call it out because of negativity. But there needs to be awareness in the community, this is the top comment somehow right now. It feels like it happens every other thread. Please do something more rigorous than manually deleting accounts.
All: if you see an account mostly posting what look like generated comments, it's super helpful to email hn@ycombinator.com with the username. We're relying heavily on user reports right now, while we're working on building better software defences. Hopefully soon, for example, we'll extend the flagging system to allow this type of report.
Edit: oops I didn't notice that tomhow had already replied!
If I want to read AI stuff I go to Clawdbook or OpenAIs Sora app.
1. It puts more effort on me as a user to report the spam via email because I have to open my email, compose one by hand and add the reasoning. The offending user in comparison probably automatically spams. Can't we have a button at least?
2. It doesn't make the community aware of the ongoing issue. Other community members could be primed that currently they need to read comments more critically. At the moment that seems like the only detection that somewhat works but if I silently send an email instead of commenting here it doesn't inform anyone else of my suspicion.
The community is well aware of the issue and off-topic meta discussion has always been against the guidelines here. We’ve discussed this publicly and privately with top HN contributors and the consensus is that this is the least-worst approach.
I think there is significant value in making people second guess content and look at it critically. Especially in a time where it is so easy to fake expertise. We all need to train that skill anyway these days for all online interactions.
10 years ago it was clickbait titles that we needed to learn to ignore, today it is LLM generated content. We will get there, but by not calling it out publicly we are making it easier for adversaries to fool everyone.
And yes I don't want to falsely accuse anyone of LLM slop either but they can defend themselves and making mistakes is part of the learning process for all of us. Writers and commenters will learn how to not sound like an LLM and we will more finely atune to the nuance between polished human writing and AI.
The answer is not to suddenly abandon one of HN’s most important principles, which is that we want to keep discussion on-topic and discourage off-topic meta discussion.
We’re developing software to respond to the new challenges that are emerging, and we already have plenty of people who email us to when they notice generated content, which is great.
We know there is no perfect approach; there never is in a large community of humans. But principles matter, and we need to trust that the principles that have made HN what it is over nearly two decades will keep it strong for years to come.
By the way, your own original comment called on us to “Please do something more rigorous than manually deleting accounts”; we are doing that but these things take time to develop, test and perfect on a platform like ours.
I recommend starting projects by first creating a way of doing (architect) and then letting Claude work. It's pretty good at pretending to be you if you give it a good sample of how you do things.
Note: this applies to Opus 4.6. I have not had a useful experience in other models for actual dev work.
Obviously. People keep forgetting that "Artificial Intelligence" does not think and is not intelligent. It just statistically predict next token in a sequence. It is all statistics.
So, Django 6 has new task framework, but LLM does not care, as Celery has better stats.
Side note: it is not only LLM thingy. Companies for years were choosing tech stack because of fashion or popularity, regardless on technical feasibility for a given solution. So we have companies adopting Kafka, even though it sucks for their usecase, companies switch from Jenkins to Github Actions, even though Jenkins was cheaper and more performant.
Technically correct, but pretty useless as a working model. Like sayin humans are not intelligent. It's just biochemical and bioelectric reactions. It's all physics.
How would you, from a Searlian perspective argue against "humans are just statistical next token predictors"?
LLM is white box that we know for sure is just a statistical next token predictor and nothing more. It's not a just a model of some black box we are trying to understand but the whole actual thing. That people think it's something more or could be something more is on them. If you understand that then you understand the flaws, limitations and vulnerabilities which is very useful.