There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.

adactio.com/links/22424

The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.

Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.

The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.

adactio.com/links/22423

The principle of least power expressed nicely:

Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.

adactio.com/links/22422

To be clear, I think AI will be ultimately extremely helpful. I still am using it on my projects. I am going to use it at my next job. I, personally, don’t hate AI.

But I can’t deny that the vibes right now are awful.

Not just bad, awful. It’s not just the “chat we’re cooked you’re the permanent underclass” stuff influencers say. It’s not just the “everybody is fucked” hyperbole CEOs sprout. It’s the actual, day-to-day experience with the technology. I’m a programmer—AI actually helps me a lot. But for normal people, their interactions are profoundly more negative, and none of the people behind this technology seem to care.

adactio.com/links/22421

You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.

adactio.com/links/22420

This superb essay by Anil Seth won the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition.

The future history of AI is not yet written. There is no inevitability to the directions AI might yet take. To think otherwise is to be overly constrained by our conceptual inheritance, weighed down by the baggage of bad science fiction and submissive to the self-serving narrative of tech companies laboring to make it to the next financial quarter. Time is short, but collectively we can still decide which kinds of AI we really want and which we really don’t.

adactio.com/links/22419

Streetwise

This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.

adactio.com/links/22417

It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.

There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.

Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.

adactio.com/links/22416

I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”

For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.

And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.

AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.

adactio.com/links/22415

Here are some design princples I can get behind: long-term thinking, resilience, flexibility and seamfulness.

adactio.com/links/22414

Thursday session

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

adactio.com/links/22412

Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!

This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…

adactio.com/links/22411

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not...

Wednesday session

My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:

…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

adactio.com/links/22408

My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:

…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

adactio.com/links/22408

I recently wrote:

The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code.

That’s the difference between technical debt and cognitive debt.

John has written lots more on this.

adactio.com/links/22407

I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work. I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist. People in general are burning out on “AI.” I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work. “AI” is Probably Stickin...

Marcin’s history of “molly guards” in hardware and software:

Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance.

adactio.com/links/22405

Frameworks like React are often perceived as accelerators, or even as the only sensible way to do web development. There’s this notion that a more “modern” stack (read: JS-heavy, where the JS ends up running on the user’s browser) allows you to be more agile, release more...

Looking forward to going to State Of The Browser in ten days.

I spoke at it eight years ago and I still like what I said then:

https://adactio.com/articles/14321

Not long now ’till Web Day Out — just three weeks! It’s also not that long until the start of a new financial year so if you’ve got training budget that needs to be used this year, send your team to Web Day Out. Not only is it excellent value for money, it’s also going...

This is an excellent one-stop shop of interface patterns:

This is an organic collection of common JS patterns that can be replaced with just HTML, CSS, and no, or very low, JS. As HTML and CSS continue to mature, this collection should expand.

adactio.com/links/22401

There are two wolves inside you…

My Builder side won’t let me just sit and think about unsolved problems, and my Thinker side is starving while I vibe-code. I am not sure if there will ever be a time again when both needs can be met at once.

adactio.com/links/22400

I don’t like magic. I’m not talking about acts of prestidigitation and illusion. I mean the kind of magic that’s used to market technologies. It’s magic. It just works. Don’t think about it. I’ve written about seamless and seamful design before. Seamlessness is often toute...

Sunday session

Knitting is the future of coding. Nobody knits because they want a quick or cheap jumper, they knit because they love the craft. This is the future of writing code by hand.

— Alice Bartlett

We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation.

The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.

We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?

adactio.com/links/22396