With an LLM, the inference cost per query is orders of magnitude higher. Unless thy have a way to command significantly higher CPMs -- perhaps by arguing intent signal is stringer in a conversation than a keyword search -- it feels like a difficult margin to sustain.

Here is a more recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8NXF2rtaEg

That's right, but this communication pattern causes serious complexity. Imagine trying to find out what triggered a state change. You would have to listen to every event source to find out. With Flux, all state changes were mediated by the reducer in the store. It made things a lot simpler.

Ah, you may be right. It's been a long time.

The number of components is not the only yardstick of complexity. Most of the complexity in building a UI comes from state management and how state changes are propagated across the store and the UI.

I worked with Backbone for many years, and I can distinctly recall the hours of frustration I had debugging a UI because it was freezing due to cascading state changes. That was because we were using Backbone Store, which had bidirectional data flow, and when one updated the store, it would trigger a change to the UI, which would change the state store, which would change the UI, etc.

You could argue that the real innovation of React was "unidirectional data flow," but React team made Flux architecture central to the framework, making it easier to adopt good practices, whereas Backbone remained store agnostic and even encouraged Backbone Store which used the observer pattern for many years. I think you should choose a framework that allows you to fall into the Pit of Success, and React was that framework at the time, and for my money, it still is.

The most recent example of this is with the addition of 2 new capabilities (Flashcards and Quiz), "Artifacts Button Container" now has 6 large buttons, and is 328px in height! There are users who are accessing the site from small screen devices in India and they have been asking for help on Discord forums because they cannot see their notes anymore. So I had to create a Tampermonkey script to let users collapse it.[0] I heard the team is fixing that soon, but they should have done more testing before releasing it.

There are other issues like this that I've fixed with scripts. The strangest one is the "notes." Why force the users read a 2000 word essay in a 360px sidebar? So I wrote a script I wrote to let you pop it into full screen mode.[1]

Another example is the chat input field. The follow up questions are hardly usable at all. And they're not stable after you select them.

I can go on all day, but I think it's better to fix things than to complain.

[0] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/94db50629cad816eca84c836...

[1] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/fded9124d62422c0d2672b8a...