Tony Alicea

With LLMs, there is even more reason for a web UX designer to learn HTML and CSS. You will basically have superpowers for user research, iteration, and design artifact generation.

So making AI features has us back to doing lots of string building like the old days. Anyone miss Perl?

LLMs won't replace skilled engineers. But as organizations shortsightedly replace junior devs, LLMs may make it harder to find new skilled engineers in the future.

I'm sorry but all these 10x agentic coding stories of a single dev getting a ton of code pushed...reviewing code *takes time* (tests or no tests). Performance, logic, edge cases, etc. all need human eyes at some point.

10x technical debt is not the flex you think it is.

The must-have skill for getting the best output from AI has actually been around for a long time. It's called "information architecture".

Good context/prompt engineering is just information architecture for language models.

I think 'context engineering' and 'prompt engineering' set poor mental models for doing it well. A better term, for a number of reasons, would be 'context authoring'.

I feel like writing a blog post on this.

Change happens. New tools appear. AI is the latest (huge) example of that.

As change blows through, I believe that fundamental understanding is an anchor. The safest most assured way to have a long, enjoyable dev career.

That's why I teach what I teach the way I teach it.

I have multiple courses in production…but work has begun on my first AI course (the first of a few).

It will be a fundamentals course on effectively using Generative AI for software development, starting from first principles of how AI works.

Stay tuned.

Web devs: What do you want to learn right now?

AI is all the rage. Fundamentals are more important than ever (you need to understand generated code). LLMs aren’t great a new things either and new tools and frameworks continue to arrive.

So…what do you want to learn right now?

State of CSS 2025 Take the State of CSS survey

The State of CSS survey is live!

Please take a moment to fill it out 🙂

It really helps us make more informed decisions on how to focus our web platform (CSS & UI) engineering and DevRel efforts!

survey.devographics.com/en-US/survey...

Uh-oh Claude is down. I guess that now means all software development stops.

6/6 If you're organizing a group that could benefit from this, I'm genuinely excited to hear about what you're building. Drop me a line at hey@tonyalicea.dev with details about your program.
#ReactTraining #Education #CommunityLearning #WebDevelopment

5/6 17 hours covering React internals, updated for React 19, with a focus on understanding rather than just following along.
Students walk away with mental models that serve them throughout their careers.

4/6 The course centers on building real understanding of how React works internally - the kind of foundation that creates confident developers who can tackle any challenge.

3/6 🎓 Whether you're:

Running a bootcamp program
Organizing a student study group
Leading a community coding initiative
Building educational curricula

I'd love to help bring deep React training to your students.

Understanding React by Tony Alicea | Understanding React Master React by learning how it works - a course by Tony Alicea

2/6 As someone who benefited from scholarships and educational support throughout my journey, I know how much access to quality learning resources can matter. I'm happy to work with groups on pricing that makes sense for your educational mission.
understandingreact.com#enroll-group...

📚 Something I'm excited to share: I'm now offering group rates for my "Understanding React" course to student cohorts, bootcamps, learning groups, and community organizations. As someone who benefited from scholarships and educational support throughout my journey, I know how much access to quality learning resources can matter. I'm happy to work with groups on pricing that makes sense for your educational mission. 🎓 Whether you're: Running a bootcamp program Organizing a student study group Leading a community coding initiative Building educational curricula I'd love to help bring deep React training to your students. The course focuses on building real understanding of how React works internally - the kind of foundation that creates confident developers who can tackle any React challenge. It's 17 hours of content covering React internals, updated for React 19, with a focus on understanding rather than just following along. Students walk away with mental models that serve them throughout their careers. If you're organizing a group that could benefit from this, I'm genuinely excited to hear about what you're building. Drop me a line at hey@tonyalicea.dev with details about your program. Link in comments below! #ReactTraining #Education #CommunityLearning #WebDevelopment

1/6 📚 Something I'm excited to share:
I'm now offering special group and community rates for my "Understanding React" course to student cohorts, bootcamps, learning groups, and community organizations.

So...we're basically deciding that "cliff notes" is the preferred way to consume all information?

And the reason we need summaries is because we have no time because social media + devices is pro-actively taking it?

Do I have that right?

To rely on the calculations of a non-deterministic machine for anything financial is insane.

How to Build the Right Software (and Choose the Right Stack) Master an AI-PROOF dev skill! Reduce scope creep and technical debt, make stack choices that solve the right problems.

www.udemy.com/course/right...

Big news - @udemy's new Role Play feature just dropped! I've added 7 investigative scenarios with AI stakeholders to my new course on building the right software. Can you talk to them and uncover the real problems?

Master an AI-proof skill --- by using AI! On sale for 5 days.👇

There's a surprise course coming in-between the courses I've announced for pre-sale. It's one I've mentioned before though. That's all I'm saying for now, but I'm really enjoying recording it.

Developers: be wary of declaring that we should 'just use' a dev tech + LLM as if it's a solved problem. Our livelihoods sit on top of a history of continuous innovation.

LLMs are stagnation machines. We need to keep innovating.

This vocabulary I find especially useful when iterating using tools like @bolt.new, @v0.dev, Lovable, and Replit.

The intent is to provide a common vocabulary for teams to discuss AI's role in the design process and the level of guidance needed during ideation and prototyping.

Which specification level would be most useful in your design workflow? #UXDesign #AIPrompting [6/6]

While shot-based prompting focuses on NUMBER of examples (zero-shot = no examples, few-shot = some examples), spec-based focuses on DETAIL LEVEL in the prompt [5/6]

🌳 Full-spec: Detailed components, layout, behavior ("Modal with title, checkbox, if complete set background color to pale yellow")

Best for: Final validation after user testing [4/6]

🌿 Few-spec: Some structure or behavior described ("Show a todo list. Clicking opens details")

Best for: Mid-design iteration when exploring implementation options [3/6]

We define three levels of specification:
🌱 Zero-spec: Only high-level intent ("Build a todo app")

Best for: Getting standard implementations of common patterns quickly [2/6]

A comparison chart for Spec-Based Prompting for User Interfaces The levels are Zero-spec, Few-spec, and Full-spec.

🧵 Introducing Spec-Based Prompting for User Interfaces – a vocabulary for guiding AI-generated designs inspired by shot-based prompting (zero-shot, few-shot) but focused on specification detail instead of examples [1/6]