1017, We need to stop calling it “AI”

Scott and Wes raid the listener mailbag to settle the pnpm vs. npm debate, decode how web standards sneak into your browser, and ask the big one: is “AI” even intelligent, or just fancy autocomplete? Plus Stack Overflow nostalgia, the Shadcn head-scratcher, and why big design systems are sleeping on modern HTML. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:44 Welcome to Syntax! 01:51 Exploring CSS Component Approaches 07:30 Brought to you by Sentry 08:09 The Advantages of PNPM over NPM 12:31 Nostalgia and Growth through Stack Overflow Wes’ Stack Overflow Scott’s Stack Overflow 19:13 The Evolution of Podcasting and Video Content 23:34 Understanding the Proposal Process for Web Standards TC39 Process TC39 Active proposals Stage 3 examples CSS Working Group Issues CSS Specifications CSS Agenda+ Chrome Platform Status Mozilla Standards Positions WebKit Standards Positions Web Platform Tests HTML Issues HTML pull requests HTML Living Standards TypeScript Issues TypeScript pull requests TypeScript Iteration Plans TypeScript blog Node Issues Node pull requests Node recent releases Node release schedule 28:25 Understanding AI: The Misconception of Intelligence 33:26 The Role of Modern Web Features in Design Systems 39:20 Navigating AI in Software Development: Two Camps of Engineers 47:05 The Importance of Fundamentals in the Age of AI 49:15 Scams in the Tech Industry: A Cautionary Tale 53:34 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott:Warhammer 40000 minitures Wes: Baby gate Shameless Plugs Scott: Wes: Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  I think like the only thing that hasn't changed is simply building stuff is going to help you learn. And if you are able to build way more and way larger stuff now that you have AI and the lessons that you have, like you're going to go down so many rabbit holes. And I will tell you, please go down those rabbit holes and deeply understand the problems that you hit, rather than just swearing into the box. Because when you fully, deeply understand what these problems are and how you could possibly tackle and solve them, that is going to make you a better developer, but a better person who makes things.

• 0:45Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about, I don't understand, Shad CN. We got a potluck episodes as you bring the questions. Why use PNPM over NPM? What does the standards process look like? We'll take a look into that. Like if something gets added to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the browsers, like, like, how does that even happen? What does that process look like, right? What should you focus on in the age of AI, especially for beginners, right? Should you go low level and like understand the fundamentals really well? Or should you go high level and like architecture and kind of like steering? Kind of interesting answer to that one. Also, really interesting question about design systems. Why do no design systems use our modern features, right?

• 1:26Wes Bos?

  We have dialogue and anchor and pop over and scroll snap and like all of these new amazing HTML features. And it seems like, especially in React land, none of them use them. So we're going to answer why that is. Submit your questions to us. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on a podcast coming up, go to syntax.fm in the nav, there's a button that says Potluck. You can type your question in and we'll answer it on an upcoming episode. Let's get into it. First question from Digital Surfer says, hello, Syntax OG listener. First time potluck questioner. Thank you for sending that in. I have been doing front end development for a long time. I see, I've seen many different CSS component approaches from Bootstrap to preprocessors, scoped components, utility classes, CSS, JS, et cetera, et cetera.

• 2:10Wes Bos?

  For every single approach, I see the pros and cons. But my question regarding specifically Shad CN approach. What is the benefit of installing components in our project? I understand we own the code, but is that a good thing? How do we handle updates? What happens if a component has a vulnerability? After we update, all of our custom code gets deleted? I'm having a hard time understanding the pros of this approach. Okay, so if you've never used Shad CN, the way that it works is that when you install a Shad CN component, it literally is just putting the component and all of its code into a folder inside of your workspace. There's no NPM dependency where you're like importing the component from Shad CN

• 2:51Wes Bos?

  and then you're like kind of changing it and literally just like copy and paste the code in it. And like this, this approach has been kind of a favorite of mine since like the WordPress days. Like, do you remember WordPress? Not remember, but WordPress has this idea of of child themes. Meaning that like you could take like a parent theme and then you could sort of like modify the bits that you want. And I never liked that approach. I like simply just like taking a theme, copy, pasting it, and then just being able to get into the code and edit it. There's no like weird dependencies, there's no black box behind that type of thing. And I can see why that is is a little bit weird. I think the benefit to that is that you are simply able to own 100% of the code.

• 3:37Wes Bos?

  Similar to like a CSS reset, you're not like getting updates to a specific component. When you bring in a component, you, that is the component that you are going to use. And if there is a new or updated or bug fixes to any part of that component, then you have to either manually apply them or use some sort of AI to apply them. But typically you just say like, yes, this is the component that I want.

• 4:06Wes Bos?

  Like vulnerabilities, a lot of the Shad件stuff is not implementing its own logic. It's using other libraries that it leans on. And those libraries can continually be updated. And it's just like if you were to write the component by hand. It's simply just like a bit of a head start in a standard way of creating your component. So I absolutely love that. I don't want to have to like worry about when a component updates, especially because a lot of the Shad件is about how it looks and like how it actually renders out. And you, I don't necessarily want it updating and then changing the look or the feel or the functionality of how that works.

• 4:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I would make a couple of like statements here based on like the things that you're worried about, Digital Surfer, I don't believe are things that are real problems. Like, how many times have you had a component that has a vulnerability, like a UI component? Like it's a, it's a modal, it's a whatever. That's not typically where these types of things live. These are very, you know, show this, hide this, move this, some CSS, some aesthetics. So like, to me, that's not a concern. Two, again, like an up, when a component updates, it's almost always a bad thing, right?

• 5:30Scott Tolinski?

  When you build something, you don't build it so that it grows as the component updates. You build it so that it works when it's done and ready. And when it's done and ready, typically you're not wanting that component to change unless like you really want, like to me, that's like a burden.

• 5:44Wes Bos?

  If you want it to change, then you change it, yeah.

• 5:46Scott Tolinski?

  Right, that's like a burden to have to worry about a library getting an update and all of a sudden my UI possibly will change. Like, I hate that. So especially in the world of now with, with AI and these types of things, like we...

• 6:01Scott Tolinski?

  Can own more of our code. And I argue, and I don't know, like, I'm definitely on the edge of the person who's always building my own stuff rather than installing libraries anyways, for a lot of these reasons. I'm building it for my use case, for my site, not as like a general purpose component. So therefore, I don't care, as long as it works in my current ecosystem. So I would say a lot of these concerns are concerns that maybe you've developed without having actually experienced them. Like, how many times have you actually experienced a vulnerability in a UI component? Or have you been like, "Ooh, I really need to get this latest update of this select list component that was written once"?

• 6:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah. And even then, if there is, like, for example, let's say there is something wrong with your select list. Let's say there's accessibility issue, or there's a bug with touch on iOS. That bug is not in ShadCN. It's in the upstream. It's either in RadixUI or BaseUI. Those are the component libraries that, or those are like the lower level libraries that ShadCN are built on top of. And those things do get updated, right? So if there are bugs, there are, for some reason, there is a security vulnerability in one of these, then it's going to be updated. But like, you got to think about ShadCN as it's your own code. And as soon as you bring that into your project, you're responsible for maintaining that thing. So what if there's a security vulnerability in your own code? Then, yeah, you got to fix it.

• 7:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah, totally. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/synthesis. You can sign up today and get two months for free. Sentry is just a really incredible tool for not only tracking your performance, making sure your application has no bugs, but even just seeing what goes wrong when something goes wrong, because things go wrong all the time when we're coding. And you don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/synthesis. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. So, okay, cool. Next question here from Rafi. Rafael.

• 8:13Scott Tolinski?

  Next question after this is gonna be from Michelangelo. Okay, from Rafael. Why choose PNPM over NPM? Okay, so PNPM is an alternative that many people love, myself included, primarily just because of speed. Now, there's a number of other features that make PNPM cool, which I'll mention, but the big one is, is that PNPM uses a global store and then SIM links the package version. So that way, if you install, you know, the same package in five different projects or whatever, it's still just referencing that one package on your computer system, making it so you don't have to have 10 billion copies of every package you use if you use similar packages throughout projects.

• 8:57Scott Tolinski?

  Other than that, it's really just very fast because of that. It only has to download what it needs to download and therefore you're not going to have to grab everything all the time. And in addition, PNPM, like, they pioneered a lot of features in package managers that, like, for instance, PNPM made it so that you have to approve post-install runs of things. Therefore, that's giving you more security because if I install a bunch of stuff, it can't just run a bunch of code for me after install. I have to approve that it's allowed to do that.

• 9:34Scott Tolinski?

  Gives you options to limit how, like, when a package was last published, if you want to go ahead and install that or not. It has baked-in update functionality. So PNPM update IL gives you an interactive picker to pick which updates you want, which, again, NPM and Node, there's things for this. It's not like there isn't, but like, it's all just baked in.

• 9:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Scott Tolinski?

  It works really well and it's fast. And I just like it. Yeah.

• 10:03Wes Bos?

  Patching is a huge one for me, is the PNPM patch.

• 10:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Wes Bos?

  Where if you have a dependency and like, there's like some bug upstream, it's really easy to simply just patch that and have it install for you, right? The workspaces are a lot easier, it's faster. It's just, it's like... NPM is not necessarily bad, but there's just a lot of little paper cuts and, and security issues, as we've seen in the last couple of months as well, where these things are simply just way easier, way better. Like, I don't even, I don't even think about this type of stuff anymore. It's just like, I just use PNP M and it just works. And I'm like, I'm not fussing over how frustrating it is. I don't want to have to spend any, any amount of time on, on fussing with any of this stuff.

• 10:51Wes Bos?

  I just know PNP M is the best and I don't have to mess with it anymore. Same with like, yarn was that for a long time, but like, I never got into yarn because it was just, just weird and half the stuff didn't work. PNP M is just fast, it always works. I know it's, it's going to be secure. You're in good shape.

• 11:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I like PNP M a lot. Again, oh, also another thing, I like not having to use the keyword run, like PNP M.

• 11:16Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 11:16Scott Tolinski?

  You just do PNP M script name instead of PNP M run. That's so stupid, but it's just like, I don't get, yeah, I, I never got the need to write.

• 11:24Wes Bos?

  I think the reason why they do that is because PNP M doesn't encompass all of NPM, right? Like, there's no like publishing and there's, there's a lot of like stuff that's not built in to, to PNP M. And it's maybe not stuff that you need, but simply just being able to write PNP M dev, it's the silliest thing ever.

• 11:43Scott Tolinski?

  Silly.

• 11:43Wes Bos?

  But I hate having to type NPM run dev instead of just NPM dev.

• 11:49Scott Tolinski?

  Also, a PNP M does workspaces really well. They do.

• 11:54Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I just said that. So good.

• 11:55Scott Tolinski?

  You said workspaces.

• 11:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 11:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, the monorepo stuff inside of PNP M means I don't have to reach for a bunch of other tools. And I love that.

• 12:02Wes Bos?

  Exactly. What did we used to use? Lerna before PNP M?

• 12:06Scott Tolinski?

  Lerna, yes.

• 12:07Wes Bos?

  Or, um.

• 12:09Scott Tolinski?

  Just so much.

• 12:09Wes Bos?

  What else was there? Yeah, there was just, the whole developer tooling space has gotten so good in the last five years. Like, if you're new to WordPress, you don't realize how much of a pain this whole space was, especially at the like height of the Webpack days. We just spent days and days building all of our stuff.

• 12:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 12:31Wes Bos?

  Next question we have here from 30387552. I logged into Stack Overflow today purely for sentimental reasons and I looked at my very first Stack Overflow question. Share your very first Stack Overflow plus the date it was made and what you were up to at the time. If you want CJ to please. Okay. I thought this was a kind of interesting question because like I, I'm almost embarrassed at some of my early Stack Overflow questions.

• 13:00Scott Tolinski?

  Shows growth.

• 13:02Wes Bos?

  It shows growth. Let me, let me share my screen here a sec. All right. I had over 16 years and 10 months, I've had 155 questions. That's, I was a heavy Stack Overflow questions. If we go to the very first question I asked was August 17, 2009. That's what 6, 7, 17 years ago. jQuery cycle questions. Pause, unload and hover actions. So I had a question with jQuery cycle was like this kind of like slideshow and I wanted for when you hovered over top of it. I wanted it to, to pause, right? jQuery fade out transparency in IE, right?

• 13:44Wes Bos?

  I wanted Internet Explorer to, to fade out when you hovered over top of it. jQuery hover is delayed. CSS link spacing and paragraph spacing. So here is the site. The banner image at the site says SNS photography. I'm not going to go into it, but I have some very, very silly and simple questions. And if you look at my highest one, Google Maps API, simple multi marker example, July 17, 2010.

• 14:13Scott Tolinski?

  That's your highest score on a question?

• 14:15Wes Bos?

  Highest. I just could not, I just wanted to put the fricking pins on it. And I think at this time. I was like all jQuery. Like I couldn't do anything other than write jQuery. So be using the Google Maps SDK, it was, it was foreign to me because it wasn't, it wasn't jQuery, right? And at the time, everybody would simply just look for a jQuery plugin that did Google Maps or something like that. But I was like, I'm going to use straight up it. And I asked somebody to give me a simple example of how, how it's working. And somebody provided that and I specifically remember building that. That was really fun.

• 14:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. My very first one was 2011 and was about jQuery UI accordion, not.

• 15:00Wes Bos?

  What's, what's your username?

• 15:03Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, what is it? Tora RTC, T O R A RTC. Yes. So remember for 14 years. See, I have an update. It still says I live in Ann Arbor.

• 15:12Wes Bos?

  Ann Arbor, man.

• 15:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. Yep. Oh yeah. My number one question is for Apollo server timeout while waiting for stream data.

• 15:23Wes Bos?

  Change that. You also had a jQuery accordion question about the same time.

• 15:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. jQuery UI.

• 15:29Wes Bos?

  We didn't even know each other back then.

• 15:31Scott Tolinski?

  I know. Meteor with, Meteor had this way of doing async await called fibers. And I was like.

• 15:39Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You always had to write inside of a fiber. It was kind of obnoxious.

• 15:44Wes Bos?

  Man, it was, what's your very first question though?

• 15:47Scott Tolinski?

  My very first question is about the UI, the jQuery UI. Basically, hey, this code that I had found on a blog wasn't working. And this, what's funny is that the, the, the suggested one, or the actual answered one is that this is not directly possible at the time. It was a bug, so.

• 16:10Wes Bos?

  So somebody patched jQuery to allow for this.

• 16:15Wes Bos?

  Unbelievable. That was, that was a crazy time. I used to like spend time on Stack Overflow and specifically wait for new questions to pop up and like try to answer them as fast as possible. And then people would try to scoop in before and answer the question. One kind of interesting thing is Stack Overflow emailed me the other day and they said, hey, we're launching Stack Overflow for agents, meaning that like, let's give the agents a spot where they can post all of their questions. And I thought, first of all, I was like, that's, that's dumb. But then I was like, maybe not. Like, does it make sense to have a spot for agents to, I don't know necessarily like post their questions, but like if, if you

• 17:00Wes Bos?

  solve something that was specifically tricky.

• 17:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Wes Bos?

  And all of that knowledge, where does that go? Maybe back into the, the data set to be trained on, but like, it's, you used to write a blog post, or you used to put it on, on Stack Overflow and then other people could find that, like thousands of people would find these questions that they also hit the exact same issues.

• 17:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And it actually would be nice if AI, because along the same line, I was having issues with like my graffiti library. AI doesn't know about it, right? So it's like, how do you teach AI about it? So AI is going to make assumptions. And instead, you know, the way I've landed on as an MCP that like, what are you trying to do? I'm trying to build this. And then it gets directly to like, it gets to the answer that it needs faster. So in like, like what if agents were like, this is the question I'm trying to answer. Let me find all of the times that this question has been answered before and then get answers faster instead of just like either guessing or not guessing, but like, uh, formulating

• 18:06Scott Tolinski?

  what it should do in that moment, right? It's like looking for validated approaches.

• 18:11Wes Bos?

  And, and I think that's good because often it will. Just like do a workaround or implement sort of a half ass thing. Whereas if the real answer has been figured out by somebody, should that information be posted somewhere for others to benefit from it? Maybe. I don't know how you possibly even like moderate something like this where you're just letting bots post a bunch of content. But maybe the, uh, the power hungry stack overflow mods will also be interested in moderating all the agents that post questions.

• 18:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Okay, cool. Oh, man, I miss that stack overflow is such a vibe from, from, you know, that like era, just.

• 18:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that was, yeah, definitely. It wasn't great because you would have a question and then you post it and then you hope, you wait for like, sometimes it'd be answered like within an hour, but sometimes it would be days before somebody who clicked on your obscure tag found it and, and went through it to fix the, fix the issue.

• 19:14Scott Tolinski?

  Ko Kai Cobb, can we get video on Apple Podcasts, please?

• 19:21Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 19:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Wes Bos?

  We are, yes, we are waiting for our podcast provider to finally implement it. If, for the longest time, Apple Podcasts only allowed video if you had two separate feeds. So you would have the audio feed and you would have the video feed and there, there wasn't really a specification in RSS on, on how it worked. Um, and then, uh, Spotify came out and was just like, you know what? Screw the specification, just upload it to us and then we can do it. And it's part of the reason why we moved over to Megaphone, which is owned by Spotify for hosting, because what that allowed us to do is we could upload the video and the audio at once and it simply just published it as, as soon as we have it.

• 20:08Wes Bos?

  Before we were on Libsyn and what would happen is our poor producer Randy would have to wait for the audio to be released publicly on the RSS feed. And then he would have to like go at 8:00 AM and upload the video. To Spotify because it didn't exist before then. And then you had to wait like two hours for the video to actually pop up on Spotify, which is annoying. Now, Apple finally allows video on their podcasts and we are waiting for our provider megaphone. They said it should be about a month or so before they actually do that. So hopefully it'll just show up one day and the video is starting to be going there. But kind of a sad thing for standards.

• 20:53Wes Bos?

  Where like podcasts is like, some people, obviously lots of people, a lot of you listening still use like standard RSS reader clients and whatnot for this type of stuff. But the only way that a lot of this went forward was by just people going around the specification and implementing it themselves.

• 21:13Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. And I don't know about you, Wes. I primarily personally watch or listen to most podcasts in my Pocket Cast audio feed specifically and only myself. All of the podcasts rather than getting into video. But for a huge portion of people, video is podcast and podcast is video. Even Netflix got podcasts now. And it's funny because when we were interviewing folks for the initial syntax producer role, somebody made a big old stink about how podcasts are audio and only audio. And even though I'm interviewing and applying for this job that is a heavy video job, I'm

• 21:53Scott Tolinski?

  going to show up just to tell you that I don't think podcasts should be video. Odd choice, but I don't, I think it's been validated that podcast is video, you know? Even though I listen to most of my podcasts on audio, I think podcast is video.

• 22:09Wes Bos?

  Totally. Podcasts, podcasts is clips a lot now and podcasts is like celebrities now. Like my wife watches the Amy Poehler one, you know? It's kind of nuts, but.

• 22:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Wes Bos?

  I don't mind celebrities. What I don't like is the.

• 22:26Scott Tolinski?

  I do.

• 22:26Wes Bos?

  Late night hosts. And that happened with early YouTube. Do you remember when like Jimmy Fallon and Colbert started popping up on like the YouTube trending? I remember being like, get out of here. This is not, you're a thing.

• 22:40Scott Tolinski?

  This is not your thing. That's all I feel about celebrities. And the celebrities of podcasting is always just like, let me talk to my other rich celebrity friends about their celebrity lives and, ooh, what is this funny story that you did one time on a TV set? Like, I don't care. I don't care at all. Like, you're young.

• 22:57Wes Bos?

  And a lot of it is, um, like, very clearly scripted, or they're like, yeah, like, there are producers in it, and it's just like, ooh, you guys are ruining the, not ruining it, but you guys are abusing the thing.

• 23:13Scott Tolinski?

  I think they're ruining it. Yes, they're ruining it.

• 23:15Wes Bos?

  That's okay. That's, now, with a lot of this stuff is, you gotta play the game, right? Like, that's, everything that gets popular, people figure out how it is. It's, social media is even that way as well. You gotta play the game if you want your stuff to be seen by other people, which is frustrating, but you can either be mad about it or go along with it. Shiven says, "How are proposals and changes implemented into browsers? For example, ECMAScript, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, CSS, HTML? What is the process from idea to code? How do we follow the process and keep up to date with the happenings?" Yeah, so every single, like, language or browser has, like, a different process for proposing new APIs,

• 23:56Wes Bos?

  right? Like, so with JavaScript, there is a committee called TC39, and they are simply just concerned with what does JavaScript, the language, look like? This is, um, "I want, I want semicolons here, or I want a sync await, or I want functions to be able to return, um, like, streams, like when we got generators, things like that, right?" So, they're not concerned, they're not like, "Oh, should we get HTML and Canvas?" That's, that's not what TC39 is about. They're simply just like, what does the language look like? And what you do, where you implement the language, is totally up to you. You can stick it on the server, you can put it in a browser, you can put it on a microcontroller,

• 24:41Wes Bos?

  whatever you want to do with it. We're just building the language. You figure out where it goes. And TC39 has several different... Stages from stage zero all the way up to stage four. We've done many episodes in the past as to like what features. And typically, when things start to hit stage three, or even like they have like a stage 2.7 now, which is when it's been approved, then you know, things are going to be starting to be put into the browser. So there's, you can take a look at the TC39 active proposals and you can look at them on GitHub. They also have meetings and whatnot that they'll go through a lot of them.

• 25:23Wes Bos?

  Typically, when things hit stage two, they'll start to be behind a flag in Chrome and you can play with them. And that's the point where if you're like a complainy person, that's the point where you should start using them to like HTML Canvas is exactly that right now. Where it's, it's just a proposal. We're trying to figure it out. And so many people are playing with it and figuring out what the edges are, which is beautiful. Because now we're all saying, hey, I wish it did X, Y, and Z. That feedback is incredibly important at that stage versus when it actually gets shipped, right?

• 25:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, it's a fascinating process, not one that I have the patience for personally. I'm more of a, I like this, I don't like this kind of guy.

• 26:06Wes Bos?

  The people that do the standards process are, are amazing. So browser as well, like CSS has the CSS working group. The browser itself has the WHAT WG, the WHAT working group. And they are responsible for like features that actually get implemented in the browser. So like, for example, fetch, fetch was not a JavaScript feature. It was a initially just a browser feature. And that's why we didn't have fetch in Node for so long. And it was standardized and it has been implemented everywhere now. But if you want to look into that, look at the WHAT working group.

• 26:50Wes Bos?

  CSS also has a CSS working group you can go into. And often there will be subcommittees for these where like somebody's like the CSS anchor working group, where it's three or four people that are simply just obsessed with CSS anchor and working through it. That's a good one to look into as well.

• 27:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, and sometimes things never leave at all. Sometimes they they get just up to the precipice like decorators and then come back down. Did you see they moved back down again?

• 27:19Wes Bos?

  Decorator's been around forever.

• 27:21Scott Tolinski?

  Moved down again, yeah. There was a time when decorators were the only thing I wanted in JavaScript. I used them like crazy. I love decorators in practice, but it's been a long time since I used decorators.

• 27:35Wes Bos?

  No TypeScript, all of these like things that are more projects. They also will have their own weekly meetings and whatnot. And I often find it kind of fun to just to, I don't go to the meetings because I find them, not necessarily boring, but they are, they're very low level. And the people that are looking through features are really getting into it. But once things start to look a little bit firmed up at that point, I will start to play around with it and take a look into it. I feel like that's a pretty good spot for syntax to be as well. Because we can take it from these folks who are like very technical and then make demos, talk about it, whatever, bring it to like the masses and then and then people will chime in with their thoughts,

• 28:19Wes Bos?

  which is important for the standards process.

• 28:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the folks that are able to do that. All right, next one here from Bike Shredder 9000. Or Bike Shredder. Bike Shredder, okay, not Bike Shutter. Bike Shredder, Bike Shutter, those are both actually, Bike Shredder is a pretty cool name. One of my most recent pet peeves is when people talk about AI like it's actually AI. It's not, it's an LLM. It mathematically predicts the next most likely token, all based on the previous set of tokens. My opinion is that the more you understand this, the better you will be at using the tool. It's impressive and it's very good at text-based tasks like coding, but it's not AI.

• 29:06Scott Tolinski?

  What do you think? Am I bike shedding? Probably bike shredder. I gotta ask for you, like, what does that mean to be AI then? If it's not just token prediction, like, how much of what we're doing in our brains is just token prediction? Or you have your knowledge that has been gained over time and your brain is working out the next most probable thing to do. I mean, like, I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but like, at what point does it matter? The means at which it is giving you the answers? Now, you can argue like sentience or the Chinese room stuff or any of that, like,

• 29:48Scott Tolinski?

  there's so many different angles that you can look at, like what AI actually is. But like, for me, I don't necessarily think the transport really, or like the technology of what is AI matters as much to me, as long as it's able to act artificially in that way. So to me, it being an LLM, I don't personally doesn't disqualify it for me, but I'm not a scientist myself.

• 30:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it is statistically probable, meaning that like, if you, the LLM providers have to put randomness into it, so you don't get the same output every single time. I'm working with Flux Images right now, and it gives you, it literally gives you the same image every single time that it output, not exactly the same, but almost exactly the same image every single time with the same input and the same like seed value as well. And that's because you start with the same thing and it will statistically try to to guess what it is that you want. I like, I get it. We get it. We get it. Like, this is just math at the end of the day, but

• 30:57Wes Bos?

  holy hell, is it good, you know? Like, it's doing exactly what I want.

• 31:02Scott Tolinski?

  But also isn't everything, isn't reality just math? Like, it's all math. It's all math all the way down, right?

• 31:08Wes Bos?

  Except for choosing colors. That's taste.

• 31:13Wes Bos?

  But I don't know. I think like the people that are.

• 31:15Scott Tolinski?

  Taste is math.

• 31:16Wes Bos?

  I think that that whole trope of like, it's not actually artificial intelligence. Like, who gives a shit? It made a website that is exactly what I wanted in like six minutes. Or like, I told it to write something in a specific way. I took in the inputs of what I wanted, what people wanted, what I had available to me. Example code. It took all of those inputs and it gave me the output that I was looking for. Right? Statistically, did a great job. So I think those annoying tropes of like, it's just, it's just sand that can think. Is, is kind of like, yeah, we get it and it's funny and everything, but it's also.

• 32:01Wes Bos?

  It's a fantastic technology. It's very good. I think.

• 32:05Scott Tolinski?

  It's funny. I was almost like to me, like when you say that, like early in days, I remember saying something about like what the AI knows. And people are like, AI doesn't know anything. Yeah, no, it doesn't know anything.

• 32:17Wes Bos?

  I think, I think where you can stop it is where people think. That it is actually like sentient, where like, it has reasoning, yes, because it goes back and forth and it just. Puts the prompt back into itself and those steps of saying, hmm, maybe I should think about X, Y, and Z. That prompt is, is great because then it will figure out exactly what you want. But the, the fact where you get to people being like, it needs a therapist or it's. People are falling in love with it or.

• 32:53Wes Bos?

  People think that it is going to, like, that's something we haven't seen. It hasn't yet. Maybe discovered. It has though. I'm trying to say like, it has not discovered things that were not known, but it has been able to like. Compute math problems that humans haven't been able to do. But maybe that's just the, the iteration over and over. The problem I have is when people are saying that it is like. It's like a, like a live being. And I guess that's probably your thing here. It's artificial intelligence. I think we understand what we mean when people say AI.

• 33:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Wes Bos?

  Next question. Anonymous says, "I'm about to change companies and work on a React design system. Shh, don't tell my employer just yet. Sorry, too late. We logged your IP address and we figured out who it was and we sent it to them." Coming from a company with a large design system only using HTML, vanilla JS, and pure CSS, but what I'm seeing on big-name design systems, think IBM Carbon, Adobe Spectrum, these are all big design systems that these companies have like put out because they have thousands of applications and they need their buttons to look exactly the same across all of them. So what I figured out is that they use very little of the modern native web elements

• 34:10Wes Bos?

  such as dialogue, details, etc., even though their browser support is way good enough already. Are they missing out on the built-in benefits and baked-in functionality? Yes, this is a question that I have myself as well. As well, it's like, where are the design systems using CSS anchor and dialogue? And like Scott just had an entire talk at React saying this exact thing, right? Like, tell me, rattle off a few of the things that the React developers are not using.

• 34:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, React developers, they're not using, you know, one thing that I think a lot of people aren't using is ScrollSwipe API or ScrollSnap API in CSS is so much more powerful than a lot of people use it for, like Instagram Reels or Swipers or this or that. People are just thinking about these ScrollSnap APIs being for like carousels. But like, the thing that's great about these is so many React components implement that stuff with JavaScript that is like, you know, changing a translation value when you're clicking and dragging. You're always going to get worse FPS than native scroll. Sorry, my dog's huffing and puffing in the background.

• 35:22Scott Tolinski?

  She's gonna... But yeah, it is so funny, the accordion stuff, like, details and summary are really good, pop over, anchor. People don't realize that anchor can even swap when you get close to the edge of the screen, really reducing a ton of extra JavaScript you might need. Where are the libraries for this stuff, man? I don't know, I've been trying to do some of this with my graffiti library to make it like a basis for other things. But again, that's like a whole thing, you know, and yeah, I don't know. What are people missing out on? In the past, it's often been animation. So like the native dialogue doesn't animate, the native details and summary doesn't animate. There's like little things here with the modals, this or that.

• 36:04Scott Tolinski?

  But like, all this stuff can be augmented with JavaScript. Or even better, now that there's at starting style, or allow discrete for animations, like you can progressively enhance. It's like, people look at it as two lanes. It's like you can either use the React component, or you can use the browser APIs. They're not like, oh, you can augment the browser APIs with JavaScript to make them what you want. Like, that's the world that I live in. So, I don't know, with AI, it's like gotten way easier too. Like we were talking about with the ShadCN stuff, to own your components and build them based off browser standards.

• 36:41Wes Bos?

  I think we have to wait for this, these new things to make their way into like the, into base UI or ShadCN. Because, right now, it's a hard place, but a lot of people simply do not care about a lot of these new features. Because they just, boop, boop, boop, AI does it all for you, and it, it works. It does exactly what you wanted. So, the, we are on the spot where like, we're finally at a spot where all of these things are in the browser. They're fairly well supported, but a lot of these like... Lower level libraries, they were built when these things didn't exist and they're not necessarily

• 37:23Wes Bos?

  just want to have to swap it out, you know, it's it's kind of tricky to have to swap it out. They're not always one to one feature parity. So it would be a lot of work. And I think the people that are doing those things don't necessarily care because they're everybody's head is just on AI right now. I think we'll probably get to a spot eventually where we'll see a lot of these new component libraries come out that are using them under the hood, using scroll snap and anchor and dialogue and all these good things. And then you will, and because of that, everybody will simply just start to use those, which is very frustrating. So I think if you were building a design system yourself, I would

• 38:06Wes Bos?

  100% use all of the new stuff that you possibly could, given what browsers you need to support.

• 38:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think one of the big things that people don't think about is that how much less work you have to do with the native stuff. Like the native dialogue element gives you keyboard support, it gives you focus trapping, like these, these things come automatically and you're not having to write, oh, hit the escape key and trigger the, the close function or any of that stuff. So.

• 38:38Wes Bos?

  I think also is a lot of companies are scared about accessibility because you can get into some real trouble when your, your site is not accessible. So because of that, people just, you just use React Aria and you know that React Aria is going to be accessible and you don't really have to put a ton of time into making sure that some weird edge case of like your, your cursor is captured when you click this thing, right? It just does a lot of that for you. So once React Aria starts to implement a lot of these things, then again, we'll be in good shape.

• 39:12Scott Tolinski?

  I think a lot of people are using React Bubble, as in they are stuck in their React.

• 39:19Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, next one from Arun Nambir. As AI gets better at execution, I keep seeing two camps emerge among early-career engineers like me. One camp is trying every new tool, model, framework, and AI workflow to avoid being left behind. They're shipping more than ever, building lots of projects, and moving incredibly fast, but often with a shallow understanding of what's happening under the hood. Any question you ask leads to the reply, "Why ask me? Just ask AI." The other camp is using AI more like senior engineers, accelerating implementation while still focusing on the fundamentals, architecture, debugging, security, and developing deep expertise in a smaller set of technologies.

• 40:03Scott Tolinski?

  But that means moving slower and potentially missing some trends, and being caught in FOMO that everyone's ahead of you. Sorry, my dog is losing her mind. I'm gonna send her outside. It's like driving me nuts, sorry. Let's see. What are we having about? There's nothing going on. If you want to leave, you can leave. You don't need to do anything. Thank you.

• 40:26Scott Tolinski?

  Can we keep that part in?

• 40:30Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, alright. Okay. Sorry, folks. So... They're either in one camp where they're putting everything to the AI, or the other camp, like senior engineers, where they are focusing on fundamentals, architecture, and debugging. Which approach do you think is more sustainable over the next five to 10 years? As AI continues to improve, does it make sense to spend a significant time mastering programming fundamentals? Or is the higher-leverage skill becoming the ability to direct AI effectively to get a working solution as quickly as possible? I'm gonna take the worst possible answer here and say both of them, because I do think there's different skills there that you should probably learn.

• 41:13Scott Tolinski?

  Now, how we work with AI models and AI in general is going to change as the models evolve over the next few years, etc. But, understanding the fundamentals, the architecture stuff, being able to debug and really have a good understanding of what the issue is without having to rely on the AI will save you a ton of time and money. I'm trying to think of like... Okay, so, last night... I got a robot. He's currently shut off, which is why he looks like this, a Reechy Mini. And the Reechy Mini app was crashing and the camera was intermittently working. And in general, there was something odd going on. You could prompt to infinity, check the logs and do all this.

• 41:56Scott Tolinski?

  And trust me, I had an AI prompt going about reading the logs and it kept saying, "Well, there must be a problem with the servers crashing for some reason. And why is the server crashing? I don't know, it could be these following reasons." And it's just trying stuff. And me, being the smart guy I am, I said, "What if there's just something running on the port?" "That the thing is trying to access it on." And there I was like, "Great idea." So obviously I checked the port and there was something running on it. It was a process that I had started a while ago and I killed it. And then the whole thing just worked. So the story is, is that I could have prompted until infinity and maybe it would have gotten there.

• 42:40Scott Tolinski?

  But the fact that I was able to have the fundamental understanding to know why these things might have been crashing, allowed me to direct the AI and validate that so much faster. So I think you need to get both. Because people who are good at prompting and can get something that looks great at the end of the day, works well, that's a whole skill in itself.

• 43:03Scott Tolinski?

  But you'll get there faster if you know what the heck you actually want.

• 43:08Wes Bos?

  I think I tend to agree with that because on one aspect of it, like the people that are so nitty gritty into something, like I think about the Pierre Computer guys that we had on, where they were so obsessed with the performance of a diff and so obsessed with the performance of a tree of like a sidebar of files, how quickly that could be rendered, that they just went low, low, low deep on that. And you would think like with AI, do we need to care about how like a sidebar renders these days? You know, but maybe the opposite is true. And they were using all these AI tools to figure out how do you make this thing even faster?

• 43:52Wes Bos?

  So I think on some regard, like, yeah, like going, going deep on specific aspects to get the best performance. But then at the same regard, like the higher level architecture, things are going to be super important as well because man, oh, man, I have made a lot of these like vibe coded apps and I'm just like not happy with them after spending three or four days on them. And at that point, like probably all of you listening have done this as well, where you're like, I have this awesome idea, I'm going to build this and then it's just not very good. You know, I didn't, you didn't really spend a lot of the time on like, yes, it's very good at

• 44:35Wes Bos?

  writing the, yeah, it's disposable and it's very good at writing the actual code, but what you want it to do, how you want it to function, what the UI looks like, what the flow for this thing is, what the architecture looks like for performance and how much it costs to host this thing. A lot of those like higher level decisions of like steering and is, is going to be super important in order to make something that is genuinely very good, you know? We're not so much worried about like what functions to write and how like to like organize your files anymore, but we certainly are very much like I even think about like this app that we're using right now, like Riverside, right? They just redid the whole thing, a whole bunch

• 45:20Wes Bos?

  of performance. There's like so many hard problems in real time video that also records to the browser, right? It's problems all the way down with like frame jitter and drop frames and slow internet connections and echo cancellation, right? It's just problems all the way down.

• 45:44Wes Bos?

  It's like writing the actual code to like make these buttons and whatnot is not the hard part anymore, but it's more about like, how do we build something that's like very good that people actually want at the end of the day? Because there's certainly a lot of very crappy software out there.

• 46:00Scott Tolinski?

  And there's only gonna get more. There's only gonna be more.

• 46:03Wes Bos?

  I have a hard time answering these questions for people who are new. The answer like, hey, I'm new to coding. What should I do? Like, it used to just be like, spend some time on the fundamentals and also spend some time getting very good at the things that are popular right now, right? Spend a whole bunch of time on React, understand how databases work, build a full stack application so you can understand how all of these things, these click together. And I think that that certainly still is important, but it's less so. And then there are all these newbies like having a hard time finding jobs as well, right? Because we're in kind of a slump in the market right now. A lot of people are firing because they think they can kick it off to AI. So I'm not really sure what I would tell somebody

• 46:43Wes Bos?

  who's brand new to this, because it's hard to be like, well, welcome to coding. Start really thinking about your like WebSocket performance when it's spanned across the globe. It's like, you can't do that as a newbie, right? It's that's that's stuff that's gained over years and years. And I don't, I don't know, man. That's hard.

• 47:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I mean, it's so funny. We used to lament how often we got the question that was like, oh, we can't answer this question again because we've answered it 10,000 times. And it feels like now is like the time where like, I feel like I need to answer this question every other month to give you a different answer on, you know, what what new people should learn here? Because I feel like it's changing that rapidly.

• 47:28Wes Bos?

  I think like, the only thing that hasn't changed is simply building stuff is going to help you learn.

• 47:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Wes Bos?

  And if you you are able to build way more and way larger stuff now that you have AI and the lessons that you have, like, you're gonna go down so many rabbit holes. And I will tell you, please go down those rabbit holes and deeply understand the problems that you hit, rather than just swearing into the box to for the AI to figure it out. Because when you fully deeply understand what these problems are and how you could possibly tackle and solve them, that is going to make you a better. Developer, but the better person who makes things, whatever we're called right now.

• 48:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I, you know, it's funny, I don't love skills. I mean, I like skills, but I don't love skills in general in AI. But the grill me skills and that style of like, go back and forth with me until every question has been answered, like forces you to be involved in the process so much more, where you are answering all the questions and then it's like presenting you with conflict ideas, conflicting ideas, like, you say you want this, but this is also a problem in these ways. And like, it can get you really thinking. So I, I like having an AI QA me on many things. I did that for our JS Nate or for my React Summit talk, where they have to do the live Q and A on stage.

• 48:56Scott Tolinski?

  I said, here's my talk, grill me on every single question that's going to be asked of me. And then it just went back and forth and I had to come up with the answers myself. It's not like I'm using the AI to get the answers. It's like, let me understand this more deeply. So, yeah. Last question here from Bob. No question, just wanted to add to your recent answer about scammers and them trying to make you run malicious repos. They have another level. Please tell your listeners not to even open the repos with cursor or VS code. They are now adding scripts to run on IDE open to swoop your global ENV and send it out. Also, the interviews seem almost legit.

• 49:41Scott Tolinski?

  They even go on Google to meet you dressed up nicely and talk about the fake job and your experience, and then slip the part of them wanting to do some technical coding challenge and try to make you open the repo with an IDE right there on the call. Man, the balls on some of these people, my God.

• 50:00Wes Bos?

  Yeah. For anyone who didn't hear that one, there was some people who had been going through interviews. And, and part of the interview was you had to do like a coding challenge. And they said, all right, just clone this repo and whatever. And he thought, hmm, that seems a bit odd. Let me just ask Claude if there's anything weird in this repo. And there was like all kinds of malicious stuff that was trying to steal your, your secrets. And it looks like. Simply, you know, when you open up a new folder in like a VS code or cursor, it's like, do you trust this folder? I'm assuming that is because VS code has the ability, has these like tasks, right? And I didn't even realize this, but they could probably run automatically like on lint

• 50:43Wes Bos?

  or on something like that. I didn't realize, I always wondered that, like, why you ask me if I trust this code? Like, what are you doing with this code? But I guess, yeah, there could be tasks that automatically spin up like Docker images or whatever, and or just like CLI scripts that will try to steal everything. So if you are interviewing, not to say that it's a brutal, brutal space, I would be so pissed if somebody wasted my time thinking like, oh, I took time off work. Now I'm having this interview and you're simply just trying to screw me and steal my like AWS keys. Bad, bad world. There's a lot of, a lot of awful people out there right now that are surfacing with

• 51:24Wes Bos?

  this newfound tech, because these bad people can now actually build stuff.

• 51:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, so don't. Right, at least before bad people were like, how do I computer? Yeah, I know, you know, I gotta go somewhere and install a physical credit card, uh, critical.

• 51:40Wes Bos?

  Credit card skimmers?

• 51:41Scott Tolinski?

  Credit card.

• 51:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 51:43Scott Tolinski?

  I was like, credit card scammer. Yes, I gotta go install it.

• 51:46Wes Bos?

  How often do you still swipe your card in the States? We were talking about this in Europe, how like they take, they take the like credit card away at, at a restaurant. In the States, they like, you pay with your credit card and they take it away to the machine. We were saying how like, I haven't done that in, in Canada, we haven't, we haven't, they haven't taken it away in probably 10, 15 years.

• 52:06Scott Tolinski?

  I was just at a restaurant on Friday that took my credit card away and I was just thinking, just bring the thing to my table. Like every good place that's not the US does. I don't know, it's most of them. I would say there are a handful of them that have moved to the bringing it to your table, but it's, it's few and far between in my experience.

• 52:23Wes Bos?

  Crazy. And you still, do you still, at a restaurant, you swipe the, the magnetic strip?

• 52:28Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know what they do. They take it back and they, I think they do the, I think they do the thing. You don't see them do it.

• 52:33Wes Bos?

  When I first signed up for Stripe in, I think it was 20.

• 52:39Wes Bos?

  10, maybe 2012. I had to like fill out all these forms and like Visa literally mailed me those like carbon copy papers that you put in the like the in the olden days, your credit card had like raised numbers and you would go gunk to like charge somebody's credit card. So when I signed up for Stripe, that's how old I am. They sent me those papers and I was like, and they sent me a little sticker that says Visa accepted here. Like you put it on the door of your business and it was obviously just like a merchant onboarding thing that they had to had to go through, but I thought that was hilarious.

• 53:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I, I worked at Target and I had to do those things. Also, I also worked at a ski hill where I had to do those.

• 53:25Wes Bos?

  Oh, man. I never, I worked at, I worked at Tim Hortons, but at the time we didn't even, it wasn't debit, it was cash only, which is wild to, wild to think.

• 53:34Scott Tolinski?

  So before we get out of here, let's do some sick picks. These are things that we find to be sick, things that we really like or enjoy that we're having a good time with. Yes, sick picks. Man, you know what? I'm going to sick pick Wes. My son and I have been getting into Warhammer 40k and it's just like painting miniatures. I played Warhammer when I was in high school, but if, I know people are like often looking for things to do, creative things to do with their kids. I gotta say, painting little miniatures, even though it's an expensive hobby, man, it's been a ton of fun to do with them. So like it's whether, anything, whether that is 40k or Warhammer, whatever. We went into the store, we got

• 54:19Scott Tolinski?

  to go pick out a box for his birthday and it had like a basic kit in it. And then we're sitting down with the little tiny paintbrushes and painting these little figurines. And like I said, I used to do it when I was a kid and my God, it's been a lot of fun to do with him and see like. Creatively what he wants to do and like, I don't know. Our son is not the best at focusing. He has, I would say, zero focus. And this is like one of the main times I've ever seen him really focus on something. And that has been just a joy to watch. So, little hobbies like that. Warhammer 40k, a lot of fun.

• 54:53Wes Bos?

  I'm going to sick pick a baby gate or pet gate if you've got pets. And I have seen the rise of baby gates getting better and better over the last 11 years of having children. Like, when I first had kids, the baby gates were these like pain in the ass wooden ones where you had to like pressure fit it. And like, you touched it and it fell down. So obnoxious. And now, I know people like to hate on like Amazon Chinese sellers, but like the, some of these products on Amazon get better every three months. And we've bought, I don't know, probably six of these baby gates that are, they roll out.

• 55:36Wes Bos?

  So you basically, you bolt it to one side of the door or like the stairs. And then you put the little hooks on one side and then you pull it out. And they, how easy they are to now undo and like just pull out. And then how nice they look when they just roll up beautifully. Unbelievable.

• 55:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So if you are like, thinking like, I need to keep my silly dog out of here. Or like, you got kids coming up, the Amazon baby gates, they're all under these stupid names. But the ones that simply just like roll up and pull out, they are fantastic now. The latest iteration of them, they have this like big paddle that you just have to slap, they lock. And then you have to like push in and the kids can't figure it out, but adults can, which is always the like delicate balance.

• 56:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I love that. I didn't know the world had changed.

• 56:26Wes Bos?

  Good.

• 56:27Scott Tolinski?

  Well, that's all I got for you.

• 56:29Wes Bos?

  All right. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We'll catch you later. Peace.