Bits&Letters is a design engineering studio founded in NYC by veteran web person David Demaree. We design and build websites and apps, specializing in helping scaling companies fix or replace day-one sites and platforms with composable, flexible systems that’ll keep up with their growth.
Bits&Letters is beyond proud to support student access to CSS Day, helping the next generation of web authors learn from and connect with some of our field’s brightest minds.
We’re sad we couldn’t make it out to meet you all IRL, but we hope you’ll connect with us virtually at 🌎 bitsandletters.com / 💌 [email protected].
by David Demaree, founder & principal design engineer at Bits&Letters
Hardly a week goes by these days without someone — usually an executive or investor selling AI products — saying that, within a year, or two, or five, we won’t have junior developers anymore, because large language models (LLMs) will have rendered them obsolete. Instead, we’ll only have senior developers who’ll manage swarms of ‘agents’, one human being doing what used to be the work of whole teams.
I’m skeptical that this will actually happen. But more to the point, I feel strongly that this should not happen.
For one thing, if there are no more junior developers… where will tomorrow’s senior developers come from? This is an inconsistency, almost a paradox, that the AI boosters seem unwilling to notice, and it’s also something of an admission about these products’ limitations. You can do the work of a whole team… if you have the knowledge and experience of a whole team and just need fifty extra hands to crank out code.
Beyond sounding like a lot of stressful extra work, this just doesn’t sound very fun. I, for one, don’t want to be alone in my office telling robots (in excruciating detail) what software to make. Sometimes I want another person who can tell me my ideas don’t make sense, or who can offer a “yes, and” suggestion that surprises and excites me.
That’s a long-winded way to get into why my company, Bits&Letters, is proud to sponsor CSS Day — events like this are important, both to form new connections with each other and put names to faces, and to elevate the conversation by giving a stage to some deeply experienced experts with strong points of view.
If you’re reading this, you may already be aware that I am not in attendance at CSS Day. I had purchased a ticket shortly after they went on sale, but for several reasons concluded I should not travel to Amsterdam this week. (One major one: my home airport is Newark, NJ, where we’ve been having some problems lately.)
But rather than simply resell my ticket, I thought this could be a good opportunity to invest in the CSS community, so I reached out to PPK about sponsoring the event instead, donating our sponsor tickets to the student pool.
I’m an old, relatively successful dude — as excited as I was to connect with the awesome lineup of speakers (some of whom I already know), for me attending CSS Day would be a nice-to-have, whereas for a student or junior developer it could be transformative. I see this event and our sponsorship as one way to ensure we’ll have future generations of CSS nerds, so we’ll continue to have people who care as deeply about pseudo-classes, combinator selectors, and clamp() as I do.