Maybe it's the amount of people from the UK that attended CSS Day this year, maybe I just wanted to use the word bollocks in an article, either way, It's my blog and I write what I want. I write on this thing called the web, which is for everyone and the web can be a really pretty place. Yep, in a world of AI making your half-baked design system we've all seen before, there is certainly a way we can do better. CSS Day showed me that the person orchestrating a Web UI will still triumph the "dude in garage with prompt machine" every time.
Before haters are going to hate, let me address the elephant in the room. I use AI every day, I even let it generate more code than I write myself. When working on client projects most is generated. My CodePens and experiments are still a place of joy where I “manually tinker”, and that’s ok for me. I believe tinkering with HTML, CSS and JS will always give an extra edge and this message became clear at CSS Day. Even if I let most of my code generate, it’s going to be full of smart layers, selectors, oklch() colors, little @starting-style transitions, popovers, anchors, container queries, etc.
That’s not because AI is that good, it’s because I know how to orchestrate it because of the love for the language called CSS.
It’s not about how the code was written, it’s about finding that perfect design system architecture, finding performance, finding that little subtle animation that makes the corner of your mouth just twitch a little towards a smile. How you write CSS can impact choices, speed, accessibility, future-proof solutions. If you know what’s possible in CSS you will reach for things, whether you let an AI write it or not, it is still the knowledge on how to do it that will impact a user experience. Think about styling selection text, styling scrollbars, progressive enhancements, view transitions and very smart light-dark mode that’s easy to tweak/orchestrate.
I am not blind to the economy, the “(wo)men in suits” are always going to prefer speed of work instead of tailored, fresh experiences. But I strongly believe we have a window here. There are many things we can fix at a rapid pace, let’s stop wasting time in recreating those same buttons and use agentic development to do more instead of the same “hey, it’s 2026 and I’m still making website look like bootstrap”-shit.
The death of Web UI
I don’t want to live in a boring world without pretty experiences. I also don’t want everything to be my preference. I love preferences on the web, mine probably lean towards purple colors and funky layouts, but when visiting a website for a metal festival, I don’t want that preference, give me something black and bold. When reading about gardening, give me something zen, with a little bit of foliage and calm greenish tones, maybe a subtle animation of a plant growing… but I digress.
We underestimate what kind of a nice place the web is time and time again (besides those cookie banners). It can make you feel joy and sadness, it can make you feel motivated for a chore, it can make you focussed on a task. But here is the kicker…
This was never a choice by sales or managers, this has always been the choice from designers and developers who went the extra mile. People who didn’t agree with the status quo. Most bosses don’t really care about code quality, they never did… Fighting for it has become way more difficult as well now that AI can write code at a rapid pace and bad quality is something only discovered after time. And believe me, we will find things in the future… when the updates start to take longer, when models will have updated, or even when the AI-tooling is finding a hard time calculating probability due to the many techniques that were just pumped in over the course of months/years. Make sure your work is better and even when using AI, that you were in control.
We need smart people that care about the output. But at a certain point in time it has to be about more than just speed. It should be about speed as a gateway to tinker more and deliver finished and accessible products. We have so much power nowadays and I can’t help to shake the feeling we’re wasting a lot of it. I don’t believe Web UI is dead, it’s a bit more dormant, and maybe doesn’t get enough attention because it’s covered by piles of mediocre software that gets released every day.
A better web and making a difference
I still believe that AI has the potential to create a better web, an enhanced web instead of a replacement. When I look at some of the amazing demos at CSS day, there were even buttons on the screen or popovers that I just wanted to press, beautiful layouts that makes you want to browse it. People demonstrating their efforts to create an accessible web.
Besides that I’m still trying to launch a multi-thumb range slider standard under the name of <rangegroup> because Web UI is just fun and important.
Give an 8-year old two experiences to select their favorite pet:
- type “cats or dogs?”
- press a picture of a cat or dog and animate the action
Let’s see which one they’ll remember by the end of the day.
We are still human, from the moment we lived in caves we used drawings to express ourselves, we love visual and shiny things. In some respects, we’re not that much different from goldfish, and you know what, that’s perfectly fine.
You are a human being, it’s ok if you don’t feel like typing and just flip a switch, watch something animated, it’s ok, you don’t always need to take the fast path, you are perfect in your own way. The web will always be a place where you can unwind for a bit, scroll a bit, with a cup of coffee or tea.
CSS Day
So, this was not an overview of CSS Day, that will come later on the company blog. But I needed to get this off my chest.
Thank you, to all the speakers at CSS Day for who you are, we’ve talked, we laughed, you showed fantastic stuff. We’ve seen that even with AI we still create shitty design systems and can improve a lot. That the fast path is not the only path, but at the same time, we have less excuses now, we really can create a better, more engaging web.
Never stop tinkering.
