Slow Programming: An Exit from "Hotel LLM" Hell?
This post came about following my Bluesky post and a response video from Kevin Powell . My thanks to him. ----- " We are all just prisoners here Of our own device " - Hotel California by The Eagles In this post, I want to make the case for slow programming. ¹ This is a reflective approach that prioritises coding as craft. I view it as a way to overcome the walled garden of LLMs, which can seduce us from expanding our knowledge and skills. Before getting into the details, let's look at some recent examples where generative AI's contracting horizon has had a negative impact on businesses. Tailwind is perhaps the premier CSS framework provider. Their business model is to upsell developers visiting their documentation pages to TailwindPlus , a paid-for library of pre-built UI components. In January 2026, they had to lay off 75% (3 people of 4) of their engineering team, leaving only the three co-owners and one part-time member still ...