As other people have said, if I wanted AI slop I'd just ask Claude.

It's entirely possible that people have just finely tuned AI to perfectly mimic them, but if it passes the Turing test, I guess I have nothing to complain about. Our rules are less about some fundamental opposition to AI and more that it's just annoying to read unedited AI slop.

AI generated text is still exhausting to read.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49940752

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

To take this argument to an absurd level, if Fable generating a feature cost $100,000 and Sonnet generating the same feature cost $1, it wouldn't be enough that Fable is marginally, significantly, or even dramatically better, because the cost difference is so outsized. For a variety of reasons, the true cost of tokens for frontier models is downplayed at multiple points (whether it's through AI companies running off funding, companies prioritizing AI adoption over AI costs, etc.)

If cost is not an issue at all, the best thing is always preferable regardless of cost. But in most cases, and AI is no exception, eventually cost will be an issue.

That would be my gut instinct - you ask your agent to change a CSS rule, and your agent would feel the need to find all usage of that rule to avoid introducing unexpected changes. Does that happen? (I'm operating purely on assumptions here because I regularly use tailwind where changes are kinda definitionally local).

Your time and attention is precious as a developer. I'm absolutely sure it's possible to implement uniqueness constraints, transactions, indices, and history yourself, but is that really the most valuable use of your time? There's probably not a need for you to have a unique solution, so you're quite literally just re-inventing something someone already had for not a lot of benefit.

Wouldn't your time be better spent actually solving the problems that whatever you're building is supposed to solve?

This isn't really straightforward with the HTML `button` tag so `a` tags that appear like buttons are common. I'm not really proposing something out of the ordinary here, nearly every high level component library that has a built in "button" will support applying them to `a` tags and most likely have that as their primary example of a button.

If you're building something where your unit of organization looks more like a "page" than super fine grained elements, Tailwind will just make things messy and a higher-level library or writing your own CSS would be a better approach.

I don't think this changes much with AI - right now most models are not terrific at maintaining a huge degree of context in larger projects, so I could absolutely see an agent implementing CSS that works well in isolation but breaks due to the cascade. Maybe that changes in the future, but right now if anything I think Tailwind is well suited to AI because it enforces a certain locality to the changes you're making (i.e. you can reasonably assume that a `text-red-500` class on an element isn't going to break things elsewhere and wll do what it says on the box).

You're right that Tailwind throws away the cascade, or at least enables developers not to have to think about it (under the hood, Tailwind 4 uses pretty modern cascading features like layers), but people aren't reaching it because of a lack of understanding, they're reaching for it because as front-ends get increasingly componentized, the cascade becomes less and less of a benefit and more of an obstacle to be worked around, and something that gets that obstacle out of the way becomes more attractive.

It hobbles `git status` and essentially forces you to keep track of what you've changed yourself (since ignored files won't show up there), and it can instill a false sense of security that `git add .` is safe when it might not be.