Mostly read like a normal article if you skip over the parts about using agents, which I did.
There could not possibly be a single thing in the world more boring than listening to someone describe using an AI agent. Might as well describe in arduous detail how you use a gas pump or a grocery store checkout.
The part where Claude specifically tipped them off felt helpful to include. Stating that you used Claude to do a first pass just sounds like "I opened Vscode with highlighting to do a first pass" and that doesn't sound so relevant.
I might be too used to using coding agents in various parts of my workflow, and others are still getting acquainted, or others find it still much different than just another standard debugging tool.
And fwiw it's probably not Claude's fault that emoji fonts load this slow, though. Wtf Safari?
Maybe off topic, but I couldn't help thinking that "we need to show a heart icon" -> "let's use a heart emoji because it's easy" -> "let's use a specific emoji font for consistency across platforms" -> "let's import it from Google Fonts every time" seems like a problematic developer mindset.
A better heuristic is always keep in mind not only developer efficiency, but also program efficiency. I'm not saying optimize everything, but keep program efficiency in mind at least a little bit. In this case, that would've led the developer to download a tiny SVG or PNG and serve it from the app itself. Which would've avoided the problem in the post, and maybe other problems as well.
While in this case we’d included the emoji font for displaying user content in another part of the app, the hazard of letting a “simple” approach expand and get out of hand is part of what I wanted to convey in writing this.
I agree that the font and emoji hops aren’t great for complexity or performance, but the problem in the post was in the rendering of a tiny SVG; serving it directly would not have avoided the problem.
Not OT at all. Emojis everywere are ridiculous. And coding agents love them! They put emojis in Python log lines which inevitably break the console, and of course in web pages. Logs don't need emojis. Not sure if anything does.
> And despite being the least-bad approach for web frontends today, the React ecosystem...
As if anyone has seriously tried anything other than the "reactive UI hacked together with callbacks or proxies, with weird XML-like syntax in the JS code" paradigm for the last 10 years.
At this point I just have to conclude that anyone who believes this stuff is good is either too indoctrinated into this workflow or just lacks ability to do even the tiniest amount of cost/benefit analysis.
I'd give people the benefit of the doubt. Personally, having built UI with Win32, WinForms, VisualBasic, Cocoa/Interface Builder, Qt, Tcl/Tk, XSLT, vanilla HTML/JS, jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Knockout, Bootstrap, MooTools, YUI, ExtJS, Svelte, Web Components, and React (including Preact, SolidJS…)… I'll happily choose the React approach. The only other one I would even describe as "good" was Qt.
I also don't get why "XML-like syntax in the JS code" is even a point worth complaining about. If anything, we should be encouraging people to experiment with more DSLs for building UIs. Make your tools suit the task. Who the fuck cares, if it's clear and productive?
Reactive UIs with unidirectional data binding (very important) seem to be the sweet spot. Spreadshees, which pioneered it in consumer software, still reign supreme.
React is quite fast, and is very compact (preact is half the sizef htmx). It seems to be the sweet spot for making rich web UIs.
In the end, this all was a red herring. The problem was in CoreSVG taking 1400ms to render an emoji, clearly a regression. A tweet would suffice to communicate this nugget, but for some reason the author wrote a long and winding piece.
This is a legitimately fun piece about a bug (or extraordinary levels of inefficiency) in CoreSVG, manifested in massive computational loads to display a single SVG fallback for a colour-specified emoji.
But, isn't the heart emoji red anyways, across basically every font that has emojis? I mean, even with variations. I'm not sure what COLRv1 brings to that table for that scenario. Although maybe the special font is overkill if you really wanted to do something crazy with an emoji or text, and it seems to focus on gradients and the like.
Maybe this is why they humorously blame Claude for getting them to use that font and its affordances in the first place.
I don't think the blog post itself is using that emoji font. The screenshot on the Noto Emoji Github page[0] doesn't look like it's using any gradients for the heart emoji, just flat shading. But it is using gradients for some of the other emojis (e.g. the croissant), and obviously the SVG fallback is all or nothing, not per-glyph.
As a bit more on this, until this piece I was oblivious to this COLRv1 thing, which is adding more of SVG-style functionality to already vector font standards.
The conclusion of "yes, Claude helped fix this, but it also caused it by recommending an emoji font" seems a bit disingenuous to me. Using an emoji font is a good suggestion, it's not like Claude (or anyone) could have known there's an SVG but that will cause this slowness.
Still, I'm going to quote the living daylights out of "These coding agents are very much like a power saw. Profoundly useful, and proportionately dangerous."
Even though this particular case may not be fair, the comparison feels like a very fair one to me. The notion that these things can be very valuable in capable hands, but costly in others.
Mostly read like a normal article if you skip over the parts about using agents, which I did.
There could not possibly be a single thing in the world more boring than listening to someone describe using an AI agent. Might as well describe in arduous detail how you use a gas pump or a grocery store checkout.
The part where Claude specifically tipped them off felt helpful to include. Stating that you used Claude to do a first pass just sounds like "I opened Vscode with highlighting to do a first pass" and that doesn't sound so relevant.
I might be too used to using coding agents in various parts of my workflow, and others are still getting acquainted, or others find it still much different than just another standard debugging tool.
And fwiw it's probably not Claude's fault that emoji fonts load this slow, though. Wtf Safari?
Maybe off topic, but I couldn't help thinking that "we need to show a heart icon" -> "let's use a heart emoji because it's easy" -> "let's use a specific emoji font for consistency across platforms" -> "let's import it from Google Fonts every time" seems like a problematic developer mindset.
A better heuristic is always keep in mind not only developer efficiency, but also program efficiency. I'm not saying optimize everything, but keep program efficiency in mind at least a little bit. In this case, that would've led the developer to download a tiny SVG or PNG and serve it from the app itself. Which would've avoided the problem in the post, and maybe other problems as well.
Not off topic at all!
While in this case we’d included the emoji font for displaying user content in another part of the app, the hazard of letting a “simple” approach expand and get out of hand is part of what I wanted to convey in writing this.
I agree that the font and emoji hops aren’t great for complexity or performance, but the problem in the post was in the rendering of a tiny SVG; serving it directly would not have avoided the problem.
Not OT at all. Emojis everywere are ridiculous. And coding agents love them! They put emojis in Python log lines which inevitably break the console, and of course in web pages. Logs don't need emojis. Not sure if anything does.
I would say just reusing widely-used emojis you have already downloaded would be less error prone
... assuming it all works ofc (though you could say that about serving svgs too)
> And despite being the least-bad approach for web frontends today, the React ecosystem...
As if anyone has seriously tried anything other than the "reactive UI hacked together with callbacks or proxies, with weird XML-like syntax in the JS code" paradigm for the last 10 years.
At this point I just have to conclude that anyone who believes this stuff is good is either too indoctrinated into this workflow or just lacks ability to do even the tiniest amount of cost/benefit analysis.
I'd give people the benefit of the doubt. Personally, having built UI with Win32, WinForms, VisualBasic, Cocoa/Interface Builder, Qt, Tcl/Tk, XSLT, vanilla HTML/JS, jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Knockout, Bootstrap, MooTools, YUI, ExtJS, Svelte, Web Components, and React (including Preact, SolidJS…)… I'll happily choose the React approach. The only other one I would even describe as "good" was Qt.
I also don't get why "XML-like syntax in the JS code" is even a point worth complaining about. If anything, we should be encouraging people to experiment with more DSLs for building UIs. Make your tools suit the task. Who the fuck cares, if it's clear and productive?
Whoa backbone, ember, knockout, what throwbacks right there.
Reactive UIs with unidirectional data binding (very important) seem to be the sweet spot. Spreadshees, which pioneered it in consumer software, still reign supreme.
React is quite fast, and is very compact (preact is half the sizef htmx). It seems to be the sweet spot for making rich web UIs.
In the end, this all was a red herring. The problem was in CoreSVG taking 1400ms to render an emoji, clearly a regression. A tweet would suffice to communicate this nugget, but for some reason the author wrote a long and winding piece.
> Noto Color Emoji is a Google font that is helpful in that it gives you consistent emoji rendering across platforms.
I’m not sure how that is helpful if users are used to the emoji look of their respective platform.
This is a legitimately fun piece about a bug (or extraordinary levels of inefficiency) in CoreSVG, manifested in massive computational loads to display a single SVG fallback for a colour-specified emoji.
But, isn't the heart emoji red anyways, across basically every font that has emojis? I mean, even with variations. I'm not sure what COLRv1 brings to that table for that scenario. Although maybe the special font is overkill if you really wanted to do something crazy with an emoji or text, and it seems to focus on gradients and the like.
Maybe this is why they humorously blame Claude for getting them to use that font and its affordances in the first place.
It's not solid red. It has shading.
I don't think the blog post itself is using that emoji font. The screenshot on the Noto Emoji Github page[0] doesn't look like it's using any gradients for the heart emoji, just flat shading. But it is using gradients for some of the other emojis (e.g. the croissant), and obviously the SVG fallback is all or nothing, not per-glyph.
[0] https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji
As a bit more on this, until this piece I was oblivious to this COLRv1 thing, which is adding more of SVG-style functionality to already vector font standards.
https://nabla.typearture.com/
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/colrv1-fonts
My natural cynicism is to ask "should a font really do this?" But I guess it's pretty neat.
The conclusion of "yes, Claude helped fix this, but it also caused it by recommending an emoji font" seems a bit disingenuous to me. Using an emoji font is a good suggestion, it's not like Claude (or anyone) could have known there's an SVG but that will cause this slowness.
Still, I'm going to quote the living daylights out of "These coding agents are very much like a power saw. Profoundly useful, and proportionately dangerous."
Even though this particular case may not be fair, the comparison feels like a very fair one to me. The notion that these things can be very valuable in capable hands, but costly in others.
... and a broken world.
How infuriating it is to see complexity so spuriously piled up upon an already holy mess.
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