Some kind of golden shovels situation. I wish there were more games, personal apps, and open hardware – more fun stuff that became affordable due to AI

I already partially covered the last few months of app development in this topic. But actually, its development took way longer, as only this iteration started in 2024. So it is the end of a long milestone— this launch date initially was to be a year ago, but I procrastinated and missed important for such apps holiday season

This year I was able to go way beyond last year’s backlog, and now I’m releasing a fully finished app instead of early access.

I’m proud of the result — a lot of overengineered stuff that is not viable in any commercial product, especially in what appears to be a simple CRUD app. For example: image loading from blur, unadvertised but very advanced DnD everywhere, natural language currency inputs with sorting, platform-agnostic quick add, and many more.

Its stack is also very fun: it has been running on the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem since 2023, and is powered by a custom Inertia.js adapter for Hono (that predates the official adapter by one month, lol), with Vue SSR. That all enables me to write old-school MVC with Vue as a template engine for views. It also proved to be very easy to work with and cheap to run.

With a tsunami of vibcoded beige wishlists, my weird app stands apart, for sure, but I’m unsure about its appeal to the average customer.

What I know is that it is listed as Unix by Opengroup https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm and it is Unix enough to get all fun benefits that make Linux great for programming

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49544729

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

And at that exact same time, we could access Reddit without login/app

You can configure and update your stuff anywhere where modern browsers can run, and have 0 spyware on your computer

Answering every point of the author:

1. You have to learn dozens of classes – these classes are named after dozens of CSS properties. So you already know them. You also take this knowledge to other projects that are using Tailwind.

2. It breaks the separation between structure and design. Also, in HTML, you put scripts and CSS into files by design. Separation is a made-up thing. And writing Tailwind with @apply is still a valid way to write it – you lose code size benefits, but design system enforcement stays.

3. Its names are not consistent. See https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes/

4. The design system is not enforced as much as it seems – you can literally detect deviations from the design system by the [] pattern, and you can force it with linters.

5. It is not a good gateway to learning CSS – Why should it be? It's a framework, not a CSS learning resource. BTW, it is still a better way to learn CSS than with auto-scoping modules.

6. It is hard to read – The author neglects clsx that is the default/available way to write CSS in most frameworks, that allows to group classes via arrays and objects.

7. The HTML lies to you about priority – Cascade is way harder than the author thinks, and by the way, one of the selling points of Tailwind is what makes complex cascade situations completely avoidable. What if color-red and color-green are in separate unscoped modules bundled up by webpack?

8. Working with Dev Tools is not comfortable. Agree, but it's how browsers devtools work.

P.S. I write CSS by hand via BEM on my own projects, and use Tailwind when I work with frontend and design teams. BEM is great, but it is much harder to onboard engineers to a BEM codebase, and no-methodology is a disastrous approach that sinks many frontend projects in bloat and cascade hell. Tailwind makes everyone familiar with code, and also Tailwind keeps our agreements with the design team in code.

1. There is a highly popular Cyrillic keyboard layout with an em dash made by design educator Ilya Birman – https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout.

2. His colleague, Maxim Ilyahov is the author of an extremely popular book on writing good copy. Somehow, this book was a bestseller for years and was read by all kinds of common folk. I once saw a janitor reading it on a break!

1. We measure "subsidization" in relation to API pricing. API pricing is very overpriced, to compensate for this "marketing subsidization", R&D, and everything else. A few months ago, Anthropic was close to being profitable

2. In general, OpenAI and Anthropic are US companies, and the US is known to have price disease, with all those huge salaries, multibillion note-taking apps, and fighter jets that cost too much to fly. China, and other countries in the future, could produce roughly the same output for way less money, as they did with everything else

3. Compute progress still happens. We can already run models better than GPT-3.5 locally on an iPhone

Since the last update, I released everything that had been in testing since April, like gallery view, custom avatars, birthdays and, most importantly – autofill from link.

Now I'm preparing for a big launch – working on the landing page, SEO and onboarding experience. Here's what I've done so far:

1. I updated the landing page to actually tell users about the app and look presentable. I already see a big improvement in conversion

2. I added SEO crap to the landing page. This is painful for me, but sadly that's how Google Search works (it doesn't). It's paying off, too

3. I overhauled the onboarding experience, to make it smoother for new users

Two more features are still in testing; I plan to ship them before the release, but currently i'm not completely happy about them.

Good that they added a tool to keep using rehype, but I’m unsure that it will last

So, yes, it’s very widely used backend for modern typescript backends