The legendary CEO of Sierra, Chairman of OpenAI, and creator of Google Maps/Facebook Likes on the future of Software Engineering, and building great products and teams at the break of the dawn of AGI.

Source: The AI Architect — Bret Taylor – Latent.Space

In the coming years, AI systems will have a major impact on the ways people work. For that reason, we’re launching the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding AI’s effects on labor markets and the economy over time.The Index’s initial report provides first-of-its-kind data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai, revealing the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy.

Source: Introducing the Anthropic Economic Index \ Anthropic

Responsive Typography has been around for at least a decade in various forms, but has become even more popular with tools like Utopia.fyi, Fluid.style, Typetura, and more – all relying on the latest CSS units and math functions. But there are still a lot of questions worth asking.

What we cover:

• What do users really want when they change the default browser font size?
• Is it appropriate for padding and margins to grow along with text?
• What all should we be responding to, and can CSS do what’s required?

Source: Relative Units & Typography | OddBird

There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it.It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They were succeeded by programmers writing machine instructions as binary code to be input one bit at a time by flipping switches on the front of a computer. Assembly language programming then put an end to that. It lets a programmer use a human-like language to tell the computer to move data to locations in memory and perform calculations on it. Then, development of even higher-level compiled languages like Fortran, COBOL, and their successors C, C++, and Java meant that most programmers no longer wrote assembly code. Instead, they could express their wishes to the computer using higher level abstractions.

Source: The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly

I’m trying to come up with ways to make components more customizable, more efficient, and easier to use and understand, and I want to describe a pattern I’ve been leaning into using CSS Cascade Layers.

Source: Organizing Design System Component Patterns With CSS Cascade Layers | CSS-Tricks

There is so much debate online about the usefulness of LLMs. While some people see giant leaps in productivity, others don’t see what the fuss is about. Every relevant HackerNews post now comes with a long thread of folks arguing back and forth. I call it the new Great Divide.I have a theory about this divide. The theory is that, on average, an LLM’s impact on someone’s day-to-day job largely depends on their level, and it follows a really interesting curve. In this post, I’ll explain the reasoning behind this idea.

Source: The LLM Curve of Impact on Software Engineers

Chrome is currently prototyping CSS Functions from the css-mixins-1 specification.A custom function can be thought of as an advanced custom property, which instead of being substituted by a single fixed value, computes its substitution value based on function parameters and the value of custom properties at the point it’s invoked.Here’s a very simple example (taken from the spec) that should give you an idea of what a custom function looks like:

@function –negate(–value) {

result: calc(-1 * var(–value));

}

Source: CSS Custom Functions are coming … and they are going to be a game changer! – Bram.us

Which local fonts can I use?I’ve been asking myself this question and I wish a place like caniuse.com contained this information. I couldn’t find one so I’m setting out to build it.

Source: Which local fonts can I use?

But there is an overarching story across the field: LLMs are getting smarter and more efficient.And while we continually hear about LLMs getting smarter, before the DeepSeek kerfuffle we didn’t hear so much about improvements in model efficiency. But models have been getting steadily more efficient, for years now. Those who keep tabs on these smaller models know that DeepSeek wasn’t a step-change anomaly, but an incremental step in an ongoing narrative.

These open models are now good enough that you – yes, you – can run a useful, private model for free on your own computer. And I’ll walk you through it.

Source: A Gentle Intro to Running a Local LLM | Drew Breunig

There are no single-player web applications: the simplest model of frontend software is a user interacting with a webpage, but the user and the webpage have similar capabilities. Your frontend application can respond to and produce events. It can modify the webpage.

So can the user: they can modify webpages at any point. Maybe they load every page in a new session, breaking your assumptions about how a website will persist state. Or maybe they never create a new session – they have 80+ tabs open that never get closed, so they will continue using versions of your frontend application that you released months ago, which now break when talking to an updated backend server.

But those aren’t the only players. Browsers are active participants in the game: a browser might translate a webpage and modify the DOM in a way that makes React crash. It might disable an API that the application expects, like localStorage, in a way that makes its behavior unpredictable. Ad-blockers might prevent some of the application from loading.

…

It’s hard work. It’s not cool. And I am nowhere near mastering it. I totally get itwhen people have an aversion to it, or think that the methods used today are wild. But mostly the methods are wild because the problem is, too. A straight-line solution to the problems of the front-end would be lovely, but those problems don’t really permit one.

Source: The web is already multiplayer – macwright.com