5,878 karma · joined May 24, 2013
Are you using Claude as an agent in VSCode or via Claude Code, or are you asking questions in the web interface? I find Claude is the best model when it’s working with a strongly typed language with a verbose linter and compiler. It excels with Go and TypeScript in Cursor.
My rugby team uses Discord for chat and announcements.
It feels…gross…inappropriate…it feels weird to use a UI covered in green gamer UI slime.
I am a fan of: https://www.youtube.com/@KevinPowell
Kevin is a no-nonsense no-hype educator. He will keep you up to date without a lot of engagement hacking.
Flex and grid enable layouts that are far beyond anything we could do with table layouts. Anyone who claims otherwise has obviously not done any amount of serious, production FE UI design and development.
Are there bits of DX ergonomics I’d like in flex and grid? Of course. Does the syntax sometimes feel a bit arcane? Yeah. But the raw power is there, and anyone who claims the contrary is either a gormless backend developer, or some troll who is trying to design things in MS Word.
My startup did.
And now we’re going to rip it all out and move to a React front-end.
HTMX makes response handling much more complex. Every endpoint returns 3–5 different HTML fragments. Frontend and backend must agree on every scenario — success, validation errors, system errors, partial updates, full reloads.
And HTMX is still a fairly obscure library. The documentation and examples are lacking, there isn’t a real set of established best practices at scale, and not for nothing, LLMs aren’t great at it.
React is mature, used at scale, provides separation of concerns, and is great for agentic AI coding. HTMX has its place for simple projects, but for anything non-trivial, it’s a no for me.
This is precisely my experience.
Having the AI work on a large mono repo with a front-end that uses a fairly obscure templating system? Not great.
Spinning up a greenfield React/Vite/ShadCN proof-of-concept for a sales demo? Magic.
Like, kind of unreasonably good. You’d expect some perfunctory Electronic app that just barely wraps the website. But no, you get something that feels incredibly polished…more so than a lot of recent apps from Apple…and has powerful integrations into other apps, including text editors and terminals.
…oh wait.
Teslas have terrible quality control, they’re impossible to get rapidly serviced, and they are run by a mercurial adversarial asshole. What kind of fleet manager worth their salt would _ever_ consider Tesla?
They had a core set of ultra-connected users who touched key aspects of the entire tech industry. The knowledge graph you could have built out of what those people read and shared…
They could have just kept the entire service running with, what, 2 software engineers? Such a waste.
Really.
It’s flawless. It just works. There are no gimmicks, there is no weird effort to gamify it into a social media play, it’s just a user-focused news reader. And that’s great.
In a lot of cases, branding matters, and having consistent cross-platform rendering matters.
However, I’ve had good experiences using system-ui with in-house dashboard-y apps. I’m the principle UI designer at my startup, and I recommend this font stack for anyone coding up internal-use-only observability tooling and monitoring stuff. We’re all on Chrome, we’re all on Macs, and getting SF Pro on the page without having to call a CDN or manage font assets is a win.
I inherited farm land from my grandfather. I am very much not a farmer, I do not want to live in Southern Illinois, but I don’t want to give up the land, so I rent the land to a farmer with adjacent property.
I realize that’s not really the point of this article—this is more about huge firms buying up non-trivial amounts of land.
There was a time, though, long ago…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity
…the brief era of “Haxies”. There was an application called ShapeShifter that allowed for Mac OS X theming.
That epoch is long gone, and I can barely even find screenshots. But it existed.
1. Permissions/auth for prototypes. Stakeholders go for that. MBA folks don’t want to be sent crazy random obfuscated URLs, they want a nice login page that makes them feel secure. (Because MBA types will get weird about corporate secrets, even just high-level wireframes.)
2. Figma/Miro-esque infinite canvas with comments. Product managers and stakeholders love that flow.
There is a lot of weirdness lurking in the default user agent stylesheet…especially in Safari: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/things-i-learned-reading-w...
Browser vendors put a lot of surprising, and very poorly documented, defaults into user agent stylesheets, and they can trip you up at the most basic level, and the styling is poorly exposed in most web inspector tooling.
I ran into a nasty one with Safari’s date picker—had to go down a lot of rabbit holes to figure out I needed to finesse the `::-webkit-date-and-time-value` CSS to get an input field styled correctly.
But for our B2B site…I can’t name names…one of our investors did refer us to a well-established design agency who does small and medium-scale enterprise branding and marketing. And they did great work. So yes, there are a few ringer VC design agencies out there.
But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.
Adobe sunsetted that project, but it still apparently somewhat lives on, in the form of Phoenix Code. (https://phcode.dev) And it still does look very “designed” in comparison to VSCode. I really like the default typography, tag highlighting, and some of the details of the text editor itself.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/WebKit_Exte...
Just this morning, I had to go down the WebKit pseudo-element rabbit hole to fix a layout bug in a very standard date-of-birth field.
Mind you, I am coming on board from a very particular station: I am a UX designer and developer, and bouncing between Figma and our HTML/CSS/Templ template stack back and forth all day. So I am writing markup more so than code.
And after a few days of using Cursor, I’m very into it. Partly because the default color scheme and layout just feels better than any theme I’ve used in VSCode. But more so, I really like their approach to the actual UI design of the autocompletes and access to AI features. They’re making a lot of smart choices that make it easier to understand what the autocomplete is actually completing, and exposing contextual keyboard shortcuts to access more features.
It also seems to be better at picking up my UI patterns than VSCode. Maybe. I need to get some more time with it, but it really seems to pick up the typographic and spacing rhythms and patterns I’m building.
Maybe she was responding to how jarring page transitions can be. I’ve gotten some good use out of the View Transitions API in a product I’m building. (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transiti...) It’s a server-side rendered multi-page app, and throwing in just a bit of view transition CSS to get a nice fade effect when you go to a different page does feel nice.
This isn’t really a new debate. This is kinda the “it looks tacky to record a feature film at a high frame rate, Peter Jackson”. We have a cultural visual vernacular that guides how we expect certain media to look, and it just feels weird to have a movie from the last century remastered so that it looks like it was shot on the latest digital camera.
He said the federal government will begin consulting with industry soon on a new AI Compute Access Fund and an accompanying strategy to expand the sector in Canada.”
So he didn’t actually announce a real investment. He announced an intent to have a budget item and to vaguely consult with…someone.
Given the absolutely dire electoral prospects of the federal Liberals come the next election, this is basically meaningless.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share
Chrome is evergreen, even on Android. Safari, after a bit of a fallow period, is updated fairly aggressively, and though it’s still coupled with OS updates, it’s no longer married to the annual x.0 releases.
Mind you, I still believe, and practice, you should write semantic HTML with progressive enhancement. But at the same time, I absolutely do not think you should go out of your way to test for some ancient version of Safari running on a first-generation iPad Pro—use basic webdev best practices, and don’t spend time worrying that container queries aren’t going to work for that sliver of the market.
1. Economic growth is anemic, and despite Canada’s vaunted environmentalism liberalism and environmentalism, is still highly dependent on resource extraction and de-facto government-sponsored monopolies like Rogers and Bombardier. https://twitter.com/mikalskuterud/status/1763207065135464872
2. Health care is an absolute mess, and I know this from personal experience, living with a paramedic. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/primary-care-canada-10-000-...
3. Housing is beyond an absolute mess—it’s broken beyond all repair. Which is, in part, because there are basically 5–6 real metro areas in Canada, and the government is utterly reliant on immigration to keep the population and workforce growing, so everyone wants to move to the GTA. https://financialpost.com/news/canada-housing-gap-bigger-tha...
4. Canadian are…I’ll be blunt, I don’t have a citation for this…complacent. They don’t have the hustle of Americans. They had a good 50 or so years there we they’ve basically been a protectorate of the US, and could coast on our military spending and corporate R&D development, with trickle-down benefits because their dollar has generally been 70% of the US dollar, and we could plonk some key assets north of the border as a tax dodge. But if Trump comes back into power, and the overall increasing skepticism of globalism, that is coming to an end.
Telegram, and really Telegram on desktop, was great. I am a stubborn old man at the age of 40, and I really prefer to type on a keyboard. It had a great UI, it always delivered messages, and syncing between devices was seemingly instant. iMessage, somehow, is still not perfect at syncing between devices, and while Signal is quite good at that, it's a pain to start using on a new device, as it doesn't bring along your message history. (For legitimate reasons, mind you.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero
Classic hard sci-fi. A colony ship’s Bussard ramjet has a glitch, and it cannot stop accelerating—and basically forever, given time dilation.
They implied they avoided that because warping into a gravity well would cause some vague catastrophe.
Of course, the real reason was far more sinister: it’s way more dramatic to slowly creep up on the planet while listening to the captain’s log monologue to start the episode.
Of course…even if that was possible, it’s conjectured that the colonists already at your destination won’t appreciate you boiling the atmosphere when you hit them with blue shifted radiation.
https://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come-wit...
Voice Assistant is a somewhat surprise flop. For a while there, voice assistants were The Big Thing that you had to have. Maybe they saw the metrics and realized everybody eventually gave up in frustration once you realized that outside of setting timers, the interaction model doesn’t scale well.