> I'd be pretty scared.

Scared of what, exactly? It looks to me like the site is primarily static content, so operational costs should be reasonable. He could scale down to just static content, and even if traffic decrease, it is not an existential crisis. Or am I missing something?

Agree the market is weird right now, but on that specific example - TailwindCSS was built around the notion of reducing keystrokes per style (basically). That's not as useful in the age of AI, of course. CSS-Tricks is about learning what modern CSS can do, which is arguably still useful. An uphill battle, for sure, but I think there's still a place for hand written human content on the web, so I plan to support it even if it's just with my clicks.

The tailwind ones slightly misleading. They laid off their staff, posted on twitter about it, opened a sponsorship program, made approximately $2 million, and THEN joined shopify.

I agree with this. In my day to day I've started AI as a glorified "look this up for me" thing and hardly look at reference sites anymore. It's a shame because I really did admire CSS-Tricks when I was starting out and referenced their stuff often. I'll be rooting for them though!

>While I do believe that selling to DigitalOcean was a mistake ultimately

using the word "ultimately" makes this "Monday night quarterbacking"

It's not a mistake to plan a picnic for a day that turns out to be rainy, even if you got paid to plan the picnic.

It would be a mistake to sell if the seller should have known at the time of the sale that the seller's goals would not be met, but something turning out badly doesn't retroactively make it having been a mistake, it just means it came out badly.

The guys made some money, it's not bad idea, specially knowing nobody cares now tutorials on internet with the era of agentic development. See StackOverflow, it's dead. They did the right thing when selling this.

>"I'm concerned about the long time viability of this move considering the current landscape of web development."

I owe Coyier and CSS Tricks a huge debt to getting my career started in the 2000s. It's loss will be tragic. But web development (as we knew it) has gone the way of elevator operators. Dead and gone. Good on the guys for getting their bag while it still had some value.

Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come. It is art, I dont care what people say, and as we all know machines mostly suck at creating art. Anthropic claims to have started training in "taste", but im sure they've realized that cannot be distilled into vector embeddings. Taste is somewhat empheral and is dictated by society and culture that machines can't experience.

In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.

Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.

I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.

This was my initial thought but I think that if he will focus on new problems arising. For example how to build websites with AI to not look like a slop, how to approach this problem, why is it happening and what to look at. It certainly is brave decision but it could also be an opportunity.