Ion Prodan has a good demo: safe in flex and grid alignment.

I keep forgetting this exists. Pray I remember next time.

Other than horizontal scrolling, like a carousel with scroll snap which is not great design strategy, I see little use for it. Maybe a safe-guard against untested content changes.

I feel like this should have been the default behaviour with unsafe being the keyword. Maybe not. I’ve thought about it for all of five minutes.

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The Sloppelganger

Just a normal, professional website, made of normal human website parts. Only the most capable and skilled of teams could have delivered such a neutral yet saccharine tone with such unnaturally high-fidelity imagery. You’re only leaving because the hairs on your neck are standing up for some other reason.

Wicked Websites: A Rogues’ Gallery - Tyler Sticka

Brilliant.

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Today we are announcing a fundamental change in how we build Warp: the Warp client is now open-source, and the community can participate in building it using an agent-first workflow managed by Oz, our cloud agent orchestration platform. OpenAI is the founding sponsor of the new, open‑source Warp repository, and the new agentic management workflows are powered by GPT models.

Warp is now open-source

Warp was a terminal that required an account — hard pass. Eventually they lifted the totally necessary cannot-work-without login requirement. At some point they pivoted to “AI”, naturally.

Warp is now claiming to be “open source”. Despite being a “VC funded startup” and having OpenAI as a new “founding sponsor”, they “do not have the resources to compete on price or massively subsidize usage”.

Warp are looking to pillage the communities free time and labour, but also: their tokens (“You’re free to use other coding agents as well to contribute”).

This is open slop; an utterly bizarre insult to the spirit of open source.

Of course, this is also going on over at Microsoft’s GitHub, which by their own admission is drowning in slop.

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1. Why was I invited to Beast Studios?
2. Beast Games 2 Strong/Smart: an Exhaustive Review

I watch very little YouTube. I loath the algorithm game YouTubers feel like they must play. Content stretched thin presented with a thumbnail like a gurning baboon. The idea of a YouTuber commenting on another YouTuber does not sound appealing. Dan Olson’s series was weirdly engrossing though.

The only thing I knew about “Mr Beast” before came from researching the comically overpriced chocolate bars that appeared in my local supermarket. They went on sale for a 3rd of the price and still struggled to sell.

It’s quite incredible how all the Beast Game challenges failed spectacularly. You’d think they would have accidentally got one idea to work as planned.

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You join a meeting with a coworker. Your coworker has enabled an AI tool to automatically take notes and summarize the meeting. They do not ask for consent to turn it on. The tool mischaracterizes what you discuss.

Do I belong in tech anymore? - Ky Decker

Ky’s post is a depressingly common story. But most who share this experience are silenced. They can’t speak up lest they be harassed and/or fired. The can’t afford to quit. What can they do, other than wait it out? Protect your mental health; rediscover your passion.

I have no meaningful advice but I am in a position to speak out. AI is not “just a tool” and I’m getting really sick of those in denial. Time for another big blog rant?

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Godot is a little overwhelming to start but that’s to be expected. Once I focused on simple tasks I found myself learning. My experiments in HTML canvas were fun but I don’t want to write an engine from scratch.

I’ve learnt today there are many ways to do things in Godot. Just because a tutorial does it one way, doesn’t mean that is correct for all games. I need to learn the smaller systems so that I can understand how to architecture my projects.

I’m not keen on the Python-like GDScript but it’s not a blocker.

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WordPress is still “yikes” for bespoke development. I’m tempted to write a follow-up but not much has changed. Pro tip: disable anything Automattic has added in the last five years. Cherry-pick Terence Eden’s big list for more debloating. Use the Classic Editor plugin. Use ACF plugin — minor enshittification since the Delicious Brains acquisition but they still honour my “lifetime” and “unlimited” license so I’m reluctant to complain.

Often I’ll hide the editor entirely and use flexible content and CSS subgrid to create what is effectively a block-based page builder. Each block is a PHP template; nothing fancy. It allows for easy development and maintenance. The editing UX is a vast improvement over Gutenberg — client feedback, not my vibes. Should I blog about this? Not sure if anyone cares. There’s a neat trick to dump HTML into the now hidden post_content (for RSS, search, etc).

People are quick to suggest WordPress forks. Forks are an impossible sell to my clients. It would probably be irresponsible of me to recommended a fork. Do they have the same security scrutiny? The same plugin compatibility? Will they remain maintained? Shrug, nobody can answer; not an option.

Why use WordPress at all? It’s never my choice so I can’t answer that. It works perfectly fine (and it’s work that pays). WordPress remains better than the JavaScript SaaS house of cards people call web development these days.

Edit: “Building Modular Themes with ACF Flexible Content Instead of Buggy Builder Frameworks” by Amber Weinberg is almost exactly how I do it (but Amber does it better.)

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Atlassian software is where user experience goes to die. Microsoft aspires to reach the soul destroying level of misery that is Atlassian. I was especially fond of the two-factor roulette game in which I had to guess which one of my “merged” accounts it was expecting.

I am finally free 🥹

Atlassian’s latest “we care about privacy” update suggests they’re now feeding it all into the giant plagiarism machine.

I’m probably too late but whatever. Long overdue.

I’ve had a few clients that used Bitbucket before. I’ll create a burner account per-project if I need to in future (after a diligent warning).

Maybe one day I’ll be able to permanently delete GitHub for business work.

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How often have you seen elaborate mid-sentence CSS flex and gap or padding styling within React apps, when all that’s missing is what I’m calling a “React space”: {' '} ?

Bluesky @sjoy.lol - Sara Joy

The “React space” is not unique to React I’ve seen it appear in my beloved Svelte before. For those who are lucky (sensible) enough to build websites for the web, and not abstractions in spite of the web, the concept might seem alien. Basically between the frameworks, their formatting tools, and div soup (aka divitis)^†, the HTML rendered is not always the HTML desired. The HTML spec also has interesting rules around collapsing whitespace.

All this means you might end up with text in elements butting together where a space is required. The React space {' '} is the correct solution, but as Sara Joy notes, developers don’t understand and try to use CSS to fix spacing. The space is just template syntax to force a literal string that React will respect. In Svelte I’ve had success by liberally using new lines between elements to avoid the issue.

The React space is a minor example of the arcane knowledge and cost you pay when you buy into a dev stack. Learn the costs!

To answer Sara’s question, I’ve seen it once (I used flex gap myself!)

^† React divitis has never been necessary and could be considered a “skill issue” but after all these years you start to wonder, maybe the tool is the problem?

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I haven’t used Zig since the last Advent of Code challenge. Juicy main is perfect to reduce a bit of boilerplate for small projects. Very tempted to jump back in now the big IO update has shipped.

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My inability to find the results others claim with AI often has me saying either 1) “these claims are obviously BS”, or 2) “I guess it’s a skill issue on my part”.

That’s a Skill Issue - Jim Nielsen

These two points may be true but they don’t adequately explain why Jim can’t get the magic lamp to sing. I’d add a third point:

3) Jim has taste and standards and cares about quality.

Once you realise that a ‘successful’ prompt wizard has a different definition of ‘success’ it all starts to make sense. Jim’s problem is that he’s reviewing the output. Bro, you’re not supposed to look!

It’s only a skill issue if the issue is observed. Schrödinger’s skill issue, if you will. Just morge and move on. Only address the issue once it’s observed by a human! That’s what makes it human-centred design.

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I don’t like vibecusations. I’ve done it before and I feel ashamed.

How can society function when vibecusations without evidence are presented as fact?

If wrong a vibecusation is just like any other libel; unfair, damaging, violating.

It doesn’t matter how much I loath slop, unless there is clear evidence I try to remain very cautious of making a vibecusation. It can be tempting and restraint is necessary.

If I have my suspicions, or I’m familiar with the author and their dirty habits, I will avoid sharing or boosting their work. That too is unfortunate if I’m wrong, but less so than vibecusing them publicly. If I’m right, others will have suspected the same. Let the court of public opinion play out silently.

I’ve seen people use “AI vetting” tools which claim to detect AI. They don’t work. Pass these tools a web page written ten years ago and they’ll happily flag a false positive. Many of these tools are openly vibe-coded by yet another dot-ai company in on the grift.

It sucks that the AI industry is eroding trust in humanity.

It sucks even more how many of my peers are gleefully drinking the Kool-Aid.

The best AI detection tool is still an educated human mind. I say “best” I don’t say “flawless”. The human mind is massively flawed for such a task.

Wikipedia has a decent article on Signs of AI writing but matching those signs does not guarantee something is slop.

Does slop fall into the “I know it when I see it” category? Not sure, that suggests a degree of subjectivity. Either something is AI generated, or it isn’t?

AI bros love to play the “what do you mean by ‘AI’?” game.

What about AI-tainted or AI-augmented work? i.e. work that started or ended with human edits. Personally to me that is still slop; I have lost all interest. As soon as it’s touched by AI the author stopped caring and so did I. There is no five-second rule for slop to be palatable.

“But what if you never notice?”, I can hear retorted. Well done, you’ve tricked me into buying stolen goods and supporting an unethical industry. It doesn’t matter how well your chat box plays the imitation game, that is not a gotcha.

If you see a vibecusation in the wild ask for evidence. Make sure the doubts are contextualised so that others can come to their own conclusion.

If you use AI to generate work it is very rude not to disclose it.

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Big fan of this code snippet:

for (const element of document.querySelectorAll("*")) {
  const tag = element.tagName.toLowerCase();
  if (tag.startsWith("mdn-")) {
    const component = tag.replace("mdn-", "");
    import(`../components/${component}/element.js`);
  }
}

MDN are using a similar conditional import technique to the one I stumbled upon.

const elements = ["component-one", "component-two", "component-three"];
for (const name of elements) {
  if (document.querySelector(name)) {
    import(`/elements/${name}.js`);
  }
}

The difference is that I lazy load based on a specific list that I must maintain. MDN simply check the name of every DOM element. Genius! This loop shouldn’t have performance issues. If the DOM is too big the website render will chug anyway.

Instead of * would a :not(:defined) selector work? Is the selector engine any faster than a simple prefix test? This might even be slower if it has to check the element registry for every element. Theoretical micro-optimisations are the enemy!

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• “Developer experience”
• “Unified toolchain”
• “Production grade”
• “Privacy-preserving”
• “Democratising”
• “Disrupting”

These terms are strong signs of snake oil. Not everything is malicious but be cautious. Be sure you’re in control of the tool, not becoming the tool. The freedom to build for an open web is not a guarantee. If you sacrifice that power for perceived convenience sold by gate keepers, you soon won’t have a choice.

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WP Grid Builder is a prime example. Excellent functionality. It even provides a no-code design interface. But for a bespoke professional theme it’s painfully difficult to style.

This filter can help in functions.php:

add_filter('style_loader_tag', function ($tag, $handle, $href, $media) {
  // Only match WP Grid Builder front-end styles
  if (is_admin() || strpos($handle, 'wpgb-') !== 0) {
    return $tag;
  }
  // Replace <link> with inline <style>
  return '<style>@import "'.$href.'" layer(base);</style>'."\n";
}, 10, 4);

This replaces the plugin specific <link rel="stylesheet"> with an inline <style> element using the @import statement. The key detail is layer(base) which effectively wraps the entire stylesheet in a cascade layer.

In my theme stylesheet I define cascade layers at the top.

@layer base, components, utility;

Now I can write my own styles in a higher layer to override the plugin. I haven’t removed the plugin styles but they have zero specificity. This is much easier to deal with. I can go to bed without crying.

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Even though it may seem like the industry is now made up entirely of tech grifter “AI” bros and vibe-coded websites are seen as the new standard in development: Craftsmanship isn’t dead, it thrives thanks to people like you and me, who have created our own little digital spaces to share knowledge that helps people, not machines.

I can’t help myself - Steve Frenzel

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This is somewhat of a thought experiment, thinking is still free, so let’s indulge.

The Cognitive Dark Forest is fun — by “fun” I mean existential dystopian nightmare. It only works if AI progress hasn’t already stalled.

I have a blog draft coming this week that touches on the subject of why publish anything openly every again.

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Side note: I considered the effect of contain: size in my visually hidden article but without real testing it was worthless speculation. Browsers have a fraught history of dealing with zero-width elements and whether they remain in the accessibility tree. Anyway as Harry notes, you’ll almost always want to specify size in some way with another property.

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