The XHTML/XML/XSLT tooling was bad, and XSLT was hard to reason about. That meant that amateurs had no way to learn it, and those amateurs went to school and became the workforce.

The web became a winner because it was easy to get something working. And then Google made it a mission to make great developer tools in everyone's hands for free.

I think in 2026 we could build the tooling around a better experience, but it would require thinking about the developer experience first.

It's not an anti-ai screed. It's that the official post was... unnecessarily wordy.

While I think there are better introductions to "first principles thinking" than this post, the idea of "...When I step back and ask what we’re actually trying to do, why it matters, and how the pieces connect, I usually find more ways forward than I expected."

That's an important skill to have.

However, I think sometimes we overvalue thinking from first principles when it isn't warranted. I've seen times in my career where first principles thinking led to a solution that ignored key non-technical constraints. (For example, it would require a full re-architecture of the system and require deferring all feature work for a year. Another example: the proposed solution breaks Conways law in a way that would require a reorg that would break other organizational constraints.)

Sometimes, we need to recognize our constraints. Spend the time to question them when appropriate, but realize that there are other tools that are more appropriate in some cases -- such as anthropological thinking.

(I am assuming they didn't train on your prompts, which is always a worry)

So in social communication, you aren't getting more precise -- in many cases, you're getting less precise and taking more words to handle that. Consider the idiom "shit or get off the pot." You can say that "Make a decision" is less precise. "Do it or don't" is also an idiom but doesn't express the frustration that the vulgarity does. "I am frustrated and need you to either take action or shut up" is more direct and possibly more offensive because it takes formality.

And then there's the prefix of "Sometimes you need to" that turns it from a command to advice. "Sometimes you need to either take action or stop complaining" sounds like the emphasis is on "you" instead of the predicate as if it's a critique of the person, whereas the idiom gives more of a proverb connotation.

The problem is that language carries many layers and "more precise" is a goal in technical communication but neglects the other layers.