Not related to web projects, but...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-agent-finds-cleans-unused-code-30-minutes-full-srinivas-ch-xkcuc

I think AI could make this design approach easier.

Right now it's uncommon because keeping cost down and being feature rich means off-the-shelf components that often have 100 features only six of which are used on the current project. So there is a huge amount of unused JS and CSS.

I've found you can get pretty good results by asking a chat to build just a minimal feature.  I suspect though I haven't tried, that a coding agent would be able to strip out unused features. That might be hard for an AI though because it requires a large context window.

Great read.  His design philosophy is spot on for the project he described, it had to work, be accessable and bulletproof.  HTML can do that.

Of course. I meant just as a prototype to get a sense of whether it truly behaves like a sail. If I understand what you're doing, it seems like unloaded it would just be a couple percent based on the CR tests. And that only at highway speeds

Hopefully you can get something viable

That's nice.

Because, you know, due to massive technological progress, no websites work anymore.

It seems like often the rapid development tools are insanely heavy.

The origin story reminds me of a freelance contract I've mentioned before. They took the low bid and launched a new site and proudly showed the VP of marketing who noted that it took 11-12 seconds to load and during that time it was a plain white screen. It was doing massive JS processing and that came after super inefficient database queries.

For $1200 I had a full analysis and got the apparent load time down to 0.5 seconds. I wish I could have fully rebuilt the site, but they didn't have budget.

One issue was that they loaded three competing JS libraries that did the same things. I told the web guy at the company that the front-end developer was insane for doing that and he said, "Actually he was really good. He didn't want to do that, but it was in the spec because different decision makers had strong opinions about JavaScript libraries."  None of those decision makers had any tech knowledge. They had just been to a webinar or read an article saying a good website had to have [blank]. So the developer complied with the brief.  The web guy at the company was a great guy and really sharp, with a full CS degree, but no decision making power.

Thanks Ergo. Hoping for a permanent solution that will last years.

First China supplier quote is in. $1k (shipping not calculated yet). Now we're getting somewhere.

Tim Harford has some interesting thoughts on AC

I don't know whether this link gives free access... I suspect the gift link cant be reused but...

https://www.ft.com/content/c5b93045-6d21-44ee-bb74-9c5db2ef2f6e?accessToken=zwAAAZ6x8Fp2kdPFuTBFbSFE7tO7dJxdsu8vbg.MEUCIBThTmhpJQWlv2CjoDqZg3az74CwGKyfWMmzBVU67f25AiEA2yvUfy6PxeEclSER0JursjQUIQ9Y2K8mtbsVDHSFViA&segmentId=e95a9ae7-622c-6235-5f87-51e412b47e97&shareId=1ca20f95-c866-4bea-af45-27b436df886e&shareType=enterprise&syn-25a6b1a6=1

CR says 13% drop in fuel economy with fully loaded roof rack on a RAV4. Much bigger impact on sedan. Probably lower impact on a large SUV or van. Probably much higher on a Ferrari or Corvette.

https://www.consumerreports.org/fuel-economy-efficiency/how-rooftop-carriers-affect-fuel-economy/