I liked it very much. But the last paragraph seemed a little … I am not sure how to describe it. Is it really the craft we should care about? Or should we more care about what humans get to think and feel?

More than anything, these changes keep me asking, "What is this for? What is that for?" Slop upsets certain signals and therefore feels upsetting, but my best hope is that we'll collectively have to reexamine our assumptions, and so there is the terror of what if the community decides in a way that leaves me and my loves out in the cold.

I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.

I agree with Tudor and this sentence. I enjoy software as a craft, but moments like these are revelatory because they always reveal what we as a whole actually value.

It's possible that an increase in slop will increase the value of crafted, intentional experiences (not just even in software, but in general) but I'm not sure I'm optimistic.

Really, I'm more curious where this takes us as a species. When we outsource everything and care diminishes, what's left? Do we move to bigger and better concerns? Or do we atrophy? At what point do we become a species left with a bunch of opaque magical artifacts that we don't understand?

Certainly, I'm in a place now where if I'm going to hand-code something, those lines of code will be works of art worth reading on their own merit, no point otherwise.

If you look at how automation was introduced in the past, in particular the development of industry, it has always lead to some equilibrium in which both automation and manual work found stable places of co-existence. We still have carpenters, but they don't make their own nails any more.

What worries me about AI and in particular LLMs is the way it is forced on society in a kind of blitzkrieg. If people could evaluate and adopt it at their own pace, we'd be much better off collectively.

If people could evaluate and adopt it at their own pace, we'd be much better off collectively.

Well said. Unfortunately I think that rarely happens with technology 😭

It's what has happened with technology for many centuries. The concentration of power in tech that allows starting a blitzkrieg is very recent.

How much of that is due to lack of regulatory oversight and concentration of power vs… it just being easier to deploy technologies? I mean, you can beam the technology straight into people’s pockets. Accessibility to new technologies is drastically greater.

updates:

• code mirror editor for HTML and CSS in playground and editor

• dark editor and vim mode toggles

• pass theme and editor toggles to editor for each example link

Try it:

• marianoguerra.github.io/margaui/playground/#button
• marianoguerra.github.io/margaui/editor/?component=button&file=active-buttons.html&theme=black&dark=

this is pretty solid! great intro

Thanks Matt!