Sunsetting The Spicy Web, and What Comes Next

This is a post I’ve been putting off for a long time, but it really is time to make a clean break and share with y’all what my plans are and where you can go to keep the dream alive of an HTML-first, indie-friendly, “vanilla” open web.

When I first launched The Spicy Web Discord in February 2021, the goal was to create a destination where people could go and talk specifically about how to build awesome websites and applications without needing to reach for gargantuan client-side JavaScript frameworks or obtuse build processes. We were shouting to the world that with a few JS “sprinkles” (which I preferred to call spices, hence the name!), you could craft some truly powerful and delightful experiences which also “go with the grain of the web” and don’t lock folks into vendor-specific idioms. We were putting a stake in the ground that modern CSS was getting, like, really really really good, and the perceived benefits of utility class frameworks Tailwind were far less potent than as advertised. We were making the bold claim that if you were to pick a website framework, it needed to provide you great leeway to get “down to the metal” and access the latest & greatest native web APIs, rather than get in your way with its own slew of techniques.

We were right about all of these approaches! And many more people have caught on in the past five years, with growing popularity of lightweight libraries like htmx, Lit, many flavors of signals, design systems like Web Awesome, and a whole lot more becoming go-to solutions for a wide variety of applications.

But something else has happened too in the past five years. The so-called agentic revolution in software engineering has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and endless debates and controversies around LLMs, agents, generative AI companies, models, cybersecurity, and even the very nature of open source itself threatens to tear the fabric of our industry apart—nay, I would argue it already has.

But before I continue down that conversational path, let me first get you up to speed on the projects I’ve worked on since The Spicy Web Discord was founded in 2021.

In 2022, I launched this website for The Spicy Web, and for a while it was just a place for me to write the occasional blog post, whether a tutorial of sorts or more of a think piece. Most of those did very well—some were widely shared and read thousands of times. The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era, published in 2023, definitely escaped containment and brought a whole lot of new folks into the Discord. (Quick aside: three years later, I actually believe the JavaScript language/ecosystem is in pretty good shape. ES modules have become the norm, Node/NPM is extremely capable out of the box, esbuild is absolutely brilliant, JavaScript itself has amassed a pretty decent stdlib, and in general you can use JS to write both frontend and full-stack apps in a fairly straightforward & maintainable manner. So congratulations, web!)

In 2023, I launched my first (and, alas, only) course for The Spicy Web, called CSS Nouveau. It was a paid subscription product, and it did rather well right at first, but then sales dropped off a cliff in 2024 and never recovered. That was also around the time a lot of other folks I knew who were offering education products saw their sales tank. Gee, thanks AI! 🙄 (And inflation, and Big Tech layoffs, and the U.S. elections, and, and…) So now CSS Nouveau is free, and shall always remain so.

Also in 2023, I felt the need to create more of an “aggregator” news-style blog centered on the nitty-gritty of web development topics, so I designed & launched That HTML Blog and eventually established its accompanying newsletter. In hindsight, I might have done a better job of establishing connective tissue between The Spicy Web and That HTML Blog, rather than having them live parallel lives, but at this point that’s actually a good thing as you’ll soon see.

Which brings us to recent changes. By the summer of 2025, I felt that the particular mission of “The Spicy Web” had run out of gas, and there was a much more urgent need to focus on the massive sea change which had engulfed the developer community. For those of us who are deeply committed to the pro-craft movement, standing firm on the principles that handcrafted code, art, and communication are vitally important and that the slop machines (aka “generative AI”) are a net negative for society and serve the interests of a fascist billionaire class not creative workers, it was important to create a destination where such matters could be discussed freely and people could be supported in their AI skepticism and the fight against unethical LLMs. (Spoiler alert: all LLMs as we currently know them are unethical.)

So I started a brand-new project called the Human Web Collective (HWC), and renamed The Spicy Web Discord to The Human Web Collective Discord. I also launched a new Reddit-style forum site built with PieFed to encourage more open sharing of links and resulting conversation. While the Discord server has been thriving, the forum never really took off (even though I use it every day to engage with other “Threadiverse” servers running Lemmy and PieFed). I haven’t given up on it completely, but my more immediate focus is to launch a proper “landing page” for the HWC, featuring links to apps and resources which are slop-free and encourage people not to let their brains get scrambled by chatbots and sloppy agents.

My personal stance is quite clear. I will never use LLMs to write code for me, nor will I ask a chatbot to write or edit any of my prose, or create images, or produce videos, or any other creative endeavor. I stand 100% in opposition to AI slop. This is a core value of mine, one which has already cost me some business but I’d much rather be “poor” and keep my soul intact than gain the whole world and lose my soul in the process. So I’m dead serious about this, and I know a lot of you out there are as well.

However, just because the moment is serious doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun. So one of the goals of the HWC is to celebrate human creativity & the indie web, and perhaps to laugh a bit at the absurdity of modern life. There’s much still to appreciate and explore, both online and off. And so ultimately the Human Web Collective isn’t simply a “negative” push against some ill, but a positive push towards a better world. I hope you’ll join us in that effort.

OK, so what’s the final tally? I said I was sunsetting The Spicy Web, and that means I’ll be adding a disclaimer to the top of this site saying it’s been archived, and I’ll switch off logins. It’ll just be a static site, frozen in time. Which is fine! That’s the beauty of a static site, it can live on “forever”.

And as mentioned, I’ll be putting my attention into all things Human Web Collective, as well as spin back up writing for That HTML Blog to highlight groovy new web APIs as well as the micro-libraries which utilize them to offer awesome DX for vanilla-adjacent projects. So the original mission of The Spicy Web will live on in one form or another, finding a place in corners of the HWC Discord as well as posts on the blog.

This feels good. I’m certainly bummed that I wasn’t able to keep up the momentum of working on new courses, but I’m confident there is plenty of good material out there now from other sources to help you learn how to build for the web utilizing all that the web itself has to offer. And as for all the threats developers now face to their craft and their livelihoods, The Human Web Collective is here to give you a voice. Coding is dead, long live coding. 🫡