CJ Reynolds Senior creator at Syntax and host of Coding Garden, covering web development, JavaScript tooling and AI coding tools.

“This was one of the best minimal classless CSS frameworks … they just announced that it is no longer maintained. Version 2.1.1 is their final release. And mainly, the reason being AI can just generate this stuff. It doesn't make sense to maintain a library when everyone's just generating their CSS anyways. … One more casualty to this new era of AI.”

Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

Context

Reynolds says goodbye to Pico CSS, a framework he used for prototypes, and relays the maintainers' reason for stopping: AI can generate the CSS instead. It is an early case of open-source libraries being retired because of AI.

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Transcript

Syntax (Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski) Around 48:36 into the episode

CJ Reynolds

I don't know. I don't know. I have to ask permission for everything, I guess. But yeah, first up, pour it out for my boy, Pico CSS.

Scott Tolinski

And if you're not familiar with this,

CJ Reynolds

…all the time for like prototypes, quick demos. The idea is you add it to the page and then you don't need. Any CSS classes, it styles everything semantically. So, like with this markup down here, your UI would look like what you see above. And so, they had semantic styles for everything like toggles and checkboxes and inputs and all the stuff that you might need. So, I use Pico CSS a bunch, but they just announced that it is no longer maintained. Version 2.1.1 is their final release. And mainly, the reason being AI can just generate this stuff. It doesn't make sense to maintain a library when everyone's just generating their CSS anyways. So, sad news. At the same time, they're still going to keep it up. Like, pico CSS.com stays up. It'll still be on npm. It'll still be on JS Deliver. So, sites won't start breaking if they were using the CDN. But again, one more casualty to this new era of AI. Another bit of news is Tanstack introduced Redact. And so, this is something that Taner talked about, I think, even like months ago, but…

Wes Bos

Like Next.js uses all of the low-level, weird edge case caching, suspense APIs. And the fact that you can just swap it out and it's what, 20% smaller? Is that am I reading that right?

CJ Reynolds

Yeah, that's what you're saving almost 36 kilobytes. That adds up a lot if you have lots of users, lots of page loads.

Wes Bos

That is crazy. I would like maybe we should have them on the podcast to talk about how he actually built this.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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