The Shrinking Half-Life of Best Practices

In a recent interview, @shl discussed a profound shift in how Gumroad made an immediate, radical change in its web development processes.

In layperson's terms, they switched from requiring humans to maintain a global design file to allowing AI to write its design elements on the fly.

In technical terms, they abandoned global CSS templates rooted in a global branding guide in Figma and instead let AI generation tools generate Tailwind code.

Why was this change profound?

Practices around CSS (cascading style sheets) have steadily improved for almost two decades. Most of these best practices revolved around groups of humans managing them to optimize their workflow. Without a unified workflow, designers, and developers can easily trip over each other.

But that all changed when AI software development tools like Cursor appeared. After all, if AI is writing more than 90% of the code, then it can handle all the overhead of managing the style changes as well (instantly).

Driving the point home, one software release completely changed the calculus of what constituted a best practice for an industry of 200,000 developers. If people were managing it, then a unified CSS document was critical. But if AI was in charge, this was unnecessary.

AI is causing these paradigm shifts to happen more frequently. Eachdustry best practices are being challenged (and, sometimes, changed overnight).

This is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it lowers the barrier to entry for people joining this profession. The curse is that we will have to constantly change how we work to keep up with new, evolving best practices.

In short, the half-life of best practices might change from 2-10 years to 2-10 months (or less). That's a profound change.