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.
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.
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.