Design & Dev

Last month, a Cloudflare engineer used AI to rebuild a major open-source project in under a week. Cost about $1,100. It shipped to production. Around the same time, a different Cloudflare team used AI to fork another project and silently stripped out the security protections the original maintainers had spent years adding. That also shipped.…

Tailwind usage is at an all-time high. Revenue is down 80%. Documentation traffic dropped 40% over two years. AI didn't kill Tailwind. AI now picks Tailwind. Every prompt. Every team. Without anyone choosing. And the moment it picks something else, every codebase built on top of that decision is on its own.

It's 4 pm on a Friday. I've approved my last PR of the week. I've reviewed more code today than I wrote. I got a lot done, or at least, the dashboard says I did. But I'm sitting here, and I can't think straight. Not in the dramatic, existential-crisis way. Just... tired. A kind of…

At some point, I stopped knowing what was on my Mac. A tool here, a dependency my agent dropped in there. Collectively, a mystery. I was losing track. To help, I created stockpile.

Everyone's building custom skills for their AI coding assistants right now. Commit helpers, linting rules, project scaffolding. Little markdown files that make Claude Code do things your way instead of the default way. I've been doing the same thing. But the more skills I wrote, the more I wanted them to follow me between machines…

I had done everything right. Or at least, everything the current playbook says to do. Used AI to fill the gaps, reviewed it myself, then handed it off to more AI.

In software, a dependency is a risk you accept. It's a package you didn't write, maintained by someone you've never met, that can break your entire application if it disappears. Good engineering means knowing which dependencies are worth the risk and which ones aren't. Right now, I'm watching our industry decide that people aren't worth…

Satya Nadella said AI would fuel a "creative revolution." GitHub told us Copilot would let developers "focus on creative and strategic work." Sam Altman measures ChatGPT's success by the percentage of human work it can accomplish. So why am I spending more time reviewing and fixing AI output than I ever imagined?

Lately, I've been questioning one of the more beloved words in our industry: "craft." It shows everywhere - in portfolios, product copy, and job listings. But is it helping us describe what we do? I think craft might be the wrong fit for modern design and development.