I think this is a major point people do not mention enough during these debates on "AI vs Developers": The business/stakeholder side is completely fine with average and mediocre solutions as long as those solutions are delivered quickly and priced competitively. They will gladly use a vibecoded solution if the solution kinda sorta mostly works. They don't care about security, performance or completeness... such things are to be handled when/if they reach the user/customer in significant numbers. So while we (the devs) are thinking back to all the instances we used gpt/grok/claude/.. and not seeing how the business could possibly arrive to our solutions just with AI and wihout us in the loop... the business doesn't know any of the details nor does it care. When it comes to anything IT related, your typical business doesn't know what it doesn't know, which makes it easy to fire employees/contractors for redundancy first (because we have AI now) and ask questions later (uhh... because we have AI now).
Ah yes the workplace culture, psychology angle. I would expect to read that on Linkedin, not here.
No, motivating people simply requires giving them more money (performance bonuses, stock options, thirteenth salary/end-of-year bonus...). DUH. OBVIOUSLY.
People in management positions always try to weasel their way out of paying their people more. (Well, not always, not all of them do, but you get my point.)
Unless you work on truly cutting edge stuff (by which I mean the likes of SpaceX and its equivalents in different industries), motivation is money.
It's as simple as that. No need to twist yourself into all kinds of pretzels.
No, it's not the coworkers (which, by the way, are not your friends unless you meet outside of work), it's not the job as such (very few people outside of art actually enjoy doing their job as an activity after say 10 years of doing it), it's money.
Money is the primary motivator (by far). You work for money. End of story. Anyone saying otherwise is a bs artist.
I work for money because I need food on the table and a place to sleep. It doesn't motivate me much more than that. In fact, I wouldn't even call it motivation. It's a requirement to live.
There have also been studies that have found that money stops making people happier or more motivated once their yearly salary exceeds a certain amount (the equivalent of 700.000NOK here in Norway).
Some people are primarily motivated by making as much money as possible, sure, but most people I've worked with have found someplace else to work once their current job stops being interesting.
To be able to do this requires perfect domain knowledge AND environment knowledge AND be able to think deeply about logical dominoes (event propagation through the system, you know, the small stuff that crashes cloudflare for the entire planet for example).
Please wake me up when Shopify lets a bunch of agentic LLMs run their backends without human control and constant supervision.
If "99.95% uptime on Black Friday", and "keeping a site secure, updated, and running" can ever be automated (by which I mean not a toy site and not relying on sheer luck), not only 99.99% of people in IT are out of a job, but humans as intelligent beings are done. This is such a doomsday scenario that there's not even a point in discussing it.
> How much money do you really need to maintain a CSS library?
Seems to me like Tailwind is a relatively complex beast covering a lot of ground, not to mention that web browsers are living/evergreen projects that are costantly moving forward, and so the lib needs frequent updates. I don't think you can avoid this (just by the nature of the project). You also need to be a css expert who follows the browser and feature development closely on top of having an excellent grasp of js/ts and the build (lightining css, vite...) ecosystem. I mean ... A few excellent engineers and a designer is probably just the bare minimum to keep Tailwind maintained.
If browsers are breaking old CSS, making new releases necessary, then that seems like a bad situation. I thought browsers were good at maintaining backward compatibility? Not so for Tailwind?
I mean just go over v4.x.x release changelogs [0].
The "web platform" is evolving at a decent pace in general [1][2]. You can sometimes do the same thing in 50 different ways (thanks to the breadth of css features and js apis and backwards compatibility), but there may be a much more elegant and robust solution on the horizon and when it hits the baseline, chances are it would likely lead to a simpler framework codebase and/or shrinked output if integrated... and therefore such a feature should be integrated. Now do this a zillion times over the life of the project. You have to keep up.
Less hacks, less code, smaller outputs.
And THEN you have all the bug reports and new feature requests.
And THEN you're supposed to work on something built on top of Tailwind that you can actually sell so you have something to eat tomorrow.
listen, I'm not saying the venn diagram between people who use mongo and people who would open it to the internet is a circle, but there is... ahem... a big overlap
Basically any online shop with decent volume / revenue is going to be spending 100s of thousands if not millions of dollars a month on Google ads. (Not just Google Ads, also Facebook ads etc.)
It used to be possible to get by with "organic" search traffic and some SEO... but google search looked completely different back then. Now when you look for something it's an AI box, products (google merchant) ad box, ad (promoted results) box, ... then there's a couple of (like two) results that are "organic" (whatever that means these days) and that's it. And we all know that when you want to hide something, you put it on the second page of google search results. So the space for doing online business "ad free" has been squeezed out over time.
And the K shaped economy is totally true in this ecomm space. These days say 15% of your revenue gets eaten by ads, but you also have say 50% higher revenue overall. At some point it becomes a margin game and the bigger players will start squeezing out the smaller ones because the biggers ones can operate on tighter margins (making up the difference with volume) which the smaller ones simply can't afford. The difference in operating costs of an eshop that sells 10000 items a month is not that different than that of an eshop selling 100000 items a month (i.e. not 10x, more like 2-3x). But selling 10x items gives you the volume you need to be able to lower your margins and put the difference into ads.
BTW all of this is handled by professional online marketing people with increasingly widespread use of AI so there's no room for the small players to make it big while not being optimized to the gills. This is why most small advertisers are seeing small or negative returns while Google and Meta are making tens if not hundreds of billions in ad revenue... The ads work, but the amounts you need to spend and the optimization level you need to have is in a completely different galaxy than it was 10 years ago.
I think this is a major point people do not mention enough during these debates on "AI vs Developers": The business/stakeholder side is completely fine with average and mediocre solutions as long as those solutions are delivered quickly and priced competitively. They will gladly use a vibecoded solution if the solution kinda sorta mostly works. They don't care about security, performance or completeness... such things are to be handled when/if they reach the user/customer in significant numbers. So while we (the devs) are thinking back to all the instances we used gpt/grok/claude/.. and not seeing how the business could possibly arrive to our solutions just with AI and wihout us in the loop... the business doesn't know any of the details nor does it care. When it comes to anything IT related, your typical business doesn't know what it doesn't know, which makes it easy to fire employees/contractors for redundancy first (because we have AI now) and ask questions later (uhh... because we have AI now).
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