Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?
The blogpost literally says he's making this his full time job. What's reasonable is to ask how that will pan out. And to, after answering oneself, tell the relevant party to be weary of it.
What you're doing is hard work, but it's way more straightforward than building out CSS Tricks.
You're a successful marathon runner. CSS Tricks will have to run a marathon with both legs tied together.
What makes your subject matter (LLMs) work is that it's a very fast moving topic, much faster moving than CSS, so people come to you for news.
Plus, it's difficult to test new models effectively, so people are looking for trusted names to do meta analysis, fast. Is the new OpenAI model better than Claude? Better how? Quality of output? Evaluated how? Even comparing prices can be difficult, as different models (at different settings) can generate different numbers of tokens (and different numbers of cached tokens) for the same tasks.
None of that applies to CSS Tricks.
CSS fundamentally can't move that fast, as long as changes in CSS require Apple, Google, and Mozilla to all agree on standards. Hardly anybody needs to know about the latest CSS news. Mostly you only need to know about Baseline Widely Available CSS features, which are at least 30 months old by definition. And when you do learn about new CSS features, it's usually pretty obvious (either to you or to an LLM) whether those new CSS features apply to something you're working on.
It's going to be very, very hard to keep CSS Tricks alive, even with a lot of hard work.
> High-value technical audiences aren't Googling for educational articles, videos, and courses. They're just asking LLMs, and getting answers.
You're right, but the high-value audiences are also looking at the sources the LLMs cite, guiding the LLMs to use specific source and exclude others (even if it's just "eschew blogspam and listicles" in the prompt). So being one of those sources is still valuable. Perhaps less so, but it's not without value.
In future LLMs will make buying decisions and this strategy can become viable again.
- publishing is fucking hard. Early on, you need a constant stream of dependable writers who do not value their time. Later on, you have a constant stream of writers but have to figure out who will make you hate your life the least.
- good writers are flaky and they always have options. A little less than half of good pitches get published. 100% of good pitches take work.
- there is a difference between good and dependable writers. Early on, you need dependable even though each one eats a lot of time. Layer on, you need good. You won’t know when to switch until your readers tell you that you suck. Then it’s too late to save your publication.
- I published before generative AI was possible but at each stage of popularity, I dealt with more PR shit bags. Add in generative AI and I’m not sure my naïveté would have survived as long as it did.
- at its best, publishing is a very expensive way to harm yourself. Back in the day, Jim Rose would have paid me to fuck myself up in equivalent ways. Naïveté convinces you that you’re changing the world through self flagellation, but when that’s gone you’re just beating the shit out of yourself.
- my co-founder handled editorial and I handled publishing. The gap between them is so massive that we really needed double the headcount. Alas, publishing is totally fucked so our budget was so low that we needed slave labour yet couldn’t even afford the slave in the first place. Without the editorial/publication divide, I would have had a heart attack five years before I did.
- there’s this thing in publishing called the trough of zero ideas. You won’t believe it’s possible in the beginning but it will hit you hard. It’s not so much there aren’t ideas; it’s that you’re tired and ideas stop feeling good… they feel like work because they are.
- in publishing it’s really easy to come up with business models. Unfortunately, every single business model requires consistently exceptional content, a reality distortion field and a lot of hand holding.
- all those membership plans etc will be invaded by sales or PR fucks as soon as you launch them. $25 a month makes a lot of people feel entitled to explain your dreams to you.
Edit - This sounds very negative and it is… but I want to publish again.
That "basically" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I don't even use Tailwind and I know the point is to localize basic style information and reduce the amount of weird CSS you have to write via functions and utilities.
Especially because Tailwind came well before CSS started natively having these features (let alone them becoming baseline widely available).
Both of those goals definitely help the current era of agents by making it easier to find the rules that affect an element without needing to reliably search all of the project CSS, and reducing required context use and the need to keep track of selector lists.
Yea. To me Tailwind was to make CSS act predictably for someone who was not an expert and just wanted to make some tweaks in a good expertly-crafted CSS theme design without seeing the strangest unexpected things happening layout-wise.
A very large percentage of the Tailwind classes also seem to be more or less 1:1 with CSS, or like 1:2.. So it's the locality and brevity IMHO that contributes most to reducing cognitive load.. Or at least in making it faster..
LLMs get along well with high locality..
I'm not sure if I'm disagreeing or agreeing with you now LOL.
using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"
It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.
It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.
(EDIT: oh maybe you're saying the same thing and I misunderstood?)
I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.
In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.
Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.
I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.
But the thing is that for the vast majority of web pages/applications, it barely matters what does the design look like, especially for B2B/internal apps. All the dashboards, CRMs, tracking tools, etc -- these exist mostly for functional requirements, so the design just needs to be inoffensive.
B2C market might hold longer, but ultimately there might emerge some sort of higher-level design specification language which would sidestep the original problem or being too recognizable.
I don't want to ruin your day, but LLMs excel at CSS, thanks to the abundance of explainer articles like those on css–tricks.com. Had a bug fixed in about 10s the other week after having stared at it myself for like 10min.
It does make really silly mistakes now and then, like using fallback css variables in the wrong order, but they are fewer and farther in between.
"I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten."
Agreed!
Then hand it to the LLM and it'll make CSS to match.