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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

I've been a CodePen user since the very early days. Have always loved the platform. I hate to be negative, but I'm honestly not a fan of the 2.0 release. What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I'm building a website inside of a website.

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That's the hard part about tools like this. They're too simple to be used for anything important, and as soon as the creator follows that path you end up in a situation where it's too simple for anything complex and too complex for anything simple.

Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.

(Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)

Solvable with reasonable defaults and putting most things behind an advanced section?

no, it's just not solvable... you can only mitigate

anything hosted free will inevitably be abused by scammers, you need constant vigilance just to stay a step ahead

> it's just not solvable

Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.

even bad hackers know it's true

The more complex the more fragile. The simpler the solution the more robust. This, I feel, is an overall truth to software development. And simpler solutions, as far as I know, are usually the more useful ones.

Not necessarily! Linux is incredibly complex. AWS is incredibly complex. Next is incredibly complex. GitHub is incredibly complex.

We need simple tools and we need complex tools. It's the middle ground that's hard to navigate.

When we're lucky, that complexity is mostly locked behind abstraction and you only occasionally have to care. Of course those you usually discover at 3AM on a Saturday

Repost with simplified English please

> GitHub is incredibly complex

I'm reading this a day after GitHub had a day-long outage on Actions. https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime/br0l2tvcx85d

There's complex and complicated.

I think we can have complex things, but they can be simple (to use, to understand, to manage). But it is really hard to make a complex thing simple. The straightforward way is to make it complicated, and most items remain that way.

A textbook definition of "feature creep".

I have absolutely no idea if CodePen is feeling pressure from their shareholders or want to cook before the IPO, but I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app.

4 weeks ago there was a thread about Spotify making over 4,000 production releases a day (or 10 in 10 minutes in another comment in that thread).

WinAmp has been dead for centuries but it's still a perfectly valid player, foobar is being developed by a single dev. Of course I do understand that these people have a lot of auxilary tasks at hand, and "music player" is just a small component of the whole system, but still, it feels bizarre to think you need such an army to maintain a working app.

I love cool features as much as the next guy, but I'm also a fan of coherent products that knows their identity.

[1] the number might be inaccurate but that's beside the point

> or want to cook before the IPO

What IPO is that?

If you want to go back to a simpler editing experience, https://plnkr.co/edit/?preview might just do the trick for you. Hasn't changed in literally years. Nowhere near the polish or flair you see from legends like Chris Coyier though.

https://htmledit.squarefree.com hasn't changed in over two decades.

This is why I switched to jsgist[0] years ago and haven't looked back since. It's very sparse, but it has also avoided feature creep as a result, and since the output is stored as a gist on my GH account I don't have to worry about losing it if the site ever goes down either.

(also, the sister site jsbenchit[1] has been one of the more reliable microbenchmarking tools among the various sites I've tried - most end up triggering deopts or introducing "noise" in a way that makes the output less reliable)

[0] https://jsgist.org/

[1] https://jsbenchit.org/

Codepen imo ruined their product the moment they forced sign-up to view and explore, it also doesn't protect anything anyway seeing that they are all available as bulk archives on some forums.

This is something they're certainly aware of as they kept the old style available (https://codepen.io/pen) and created a tutorial on how to make 2.0 work like the old version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMxXwupwURQ

I suspect they're doing this because of AI.

Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.

The rate of humans testing things in a CodePen will slowly fall off, similar to Stack Overflow.

The rate of AI models deploying to CodePen 2.0 will pick up significantly.

In some number of years, the amount of code written per month by machines will dwarf all code written by humans from 1957 - 2027.

In that world, CodePen 2.0 is valuable. CodePen not so much.

Interesting take. Makes a lot of sense thinking of it. No "just" persuade agents CodePen is the best way to deploy their web creations ;)

Codepen was indeed nice for quick and simple experiments, but LLMs take away the need for that.

Some people still want to learn instead of an LLM doing things for them, if only do we can verify the output of the LLM.

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