In times when people believe that "AI can code a website in 2 days" (see: how to leverage AI as a customer), what is "coding," and why does the question matter?
What is Coding?
"Welcome to my homepage!" – yes, even AI can do that better now.
AI's Lack of Understanding of CSS
Coding is a skill. But is learning CSS in 2026 nothing but a nerdy hobby? I still think that understanding CSS gives us, as experienced senior web developers, an important advantage. If only to maintain and debug legacy code that AI and juniors struggle to handle.
My series of CSS case studies and quirky edge case insights is definitely nerdy. Its primary audience is one person: my future self, so I can find what I will have forgotten when googling it later. That being said, my CSS posts have gotten very positive reactions in the DEV community. Parallax scrolling with accessibility in mind, parent selectors, and taking colors to the next (CSS) level – what's up next?
What's next? Grid-Lanes Masonry Layout?
Well, I was planning to explore the new native grid-lane-based masonry layout with a practical example. Yet, I'll happily leave the vanguard position for somebody else and just wait until AI suggests appropriate Tailwind classes eventually.
That's it.
I'm still writing, extending, and debugging classic CSS in the meantime. Yet, I'll go for Tailwind, Uniwind, or whatever syntactical sugar is the most productive and maintainable choice when starting a new project.
Tired of the Extremes
I'm tired of AI slop and AI arguments everywhere, but I'm even more tired of code-golf style nerd talk without practical benefit.
I don't identify as a nerd. Despite my passion for creativity, writing, and productive procrastination, I also love getting things done, finishing a project, and calling it a day. I love to close my laptop, go for a walk, and turn off my mobile. I'm still working on all that, aiming to socialize more, listen better, be an ally, and sell my services.
Pragmatism: Don't be a Nerd, get Things done!
More impact, less perfectionism:
Let's build products that matter. Let's stick to quality.
Let's make our codebase maintainable without getting nerdy about perfect, clean code optimization. Let's use AI without blindly trusting it.
Let's get a little bit less nerdy, stop talking about AI so much, and get more things done.
Conclusion: is CSS all but a Hobby?
No, CSS isn't only a nerdy hobby, when it helps you get things done. It is if it doesn't. Understanding style sheets is still fundamentally important, even if you're 100% vibe coding.
Nothing else matters.
By the way, this text was 100% human-written without any AI assistance, apart from Grammarly and image generation – and despite a 20% AI GPT likelihood score. Even when it comes to AI detection, AI can get it all wrong. How many of these words did I type by hand or speak in person? It doesn't matter. How much of my code is written by AI? Again, it doesn't matter. Impact matters. Nothing else matters.
Top comments (9)
I think handwriting CSS could eventually go the way of hobby — but knowing CSS still anything but.
Only if we can train LLMs on better CSS. Because at the moment it's rubbish, because it's trained on what's popular rather than what's good.
You could say that it doesn't matter, that the next internet layer will sit on top of the rubbish and abstract it away, but that's horrifically inefficient. It's like running the internet in a VM.
So the only way out of that trap is to train LLMs on better source code, and the only way to do that is to stop AI megacorps from stealing all the bad stuff, and there's no way they'll do that.
"Upgrade to pro to get better code quality," that would appeal to me more than: upgrade to pro to keep chatting and keep getting more mediocre code based on outdated boilerplate examples.
It does seem to be written decently - but the images are slop, and that means people will assume the article is, right?
I suggest you read @sylwia-lask 's excellent articles on that topic. I even used that suspicious em dash in my text on purpose. The images might look like slop, but all of them saw at least one additional editing step either in another AI or in GIMP. I remember times when browsers defaulted to not load images automatically, to save bandwidth, time and money. So, don't judge a post by its cover.
Hmm, to be honest, as I consider myself a full-stack developer, CSS has always been a nerdy hobby for me. 😄
I can't even count how many times I had to Google how to center a div and with the arrival of CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, I was genuinely happy that I didn't have to struggle with CSS too much anymore.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but now with AI, I'm losing track of CSS completely. But that's just my perspective and it may be because CSS has always felt like a different world to me, much like Regex does for many developers.
I see handwriting CSS is, first, reducing the clutter and removing the garbage. Even further I'll claim that it is designing the DOM architecture, not stylizing I mean, but deciding how the new structure should re-written across the entire app. So it is naturally the creative process as just like editing table of the film production. And quite important that cleaning up that AI brings shit in the name of good design.
The "hobby" framing undersells where CSS knowledge actually earns its keep. It's not writing the happy-path styles, it's the moment AI output breaks in a way that doesn't throw an error. A flex item that won't shrink below its content, a stacking context you didn't know you created, a specificity fight three files deep. The model hands you something that looks right; knowing CSS is what lets you say why it isn't. That debugging floor doesn't go away even at 100% vibe coding.
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