Stop building heavy websites that kill my CPU performance
We've reached a weird point where marketing teams seem to think that hijacking a user's scroll behavior and layering 50 million CSS animations is a requirement for being "cool" in 2025 or 2026. It’s a massive failure in UX. When a site lags, the user experience is broken before the customer even reads a single word about the product.
The "Agentic Age" excuse is a technical fallacy
There is this growing argument among developers and founders that we don't need to care about performance because "we are in the agentic age" and humans aren't reading websites anyway—AI agents are. That is a fundamentally flawed way to approach prompt engineering and web accessibility.
If you build a site that is so visually chaotic and DOM-heavy that an AI agent has to wait 10 seconds for the layout to stabilize before it can even begin to parse the content, you haven't built a "future-proof" site. You've built a technical nightmare. Even the most advanced vision-language models struggle when they have to navigate through layers of non-standard layouts and heavy JavaScript execution just to find a simple value proposition. A clean, text-heavy, high-performance site is actually much more "agent-friendly" than a bloated "vibe" site.
Real-world performance issues
Even companies that are widely praised in the dev community are falling into this trap. I recently tried revisiting some high-profile startup sites—some of the ones that constantly trend on X—and the performance was genuinely shocking.
- Hardware tested: M1 Max MacBook Pro and a high-end desktop workstation.
- Settings: No "reduce motion" enabled, full GPU acceleration active.
- The Result: Massive frame drops, input lag, and stuttering animations.
It’s frustrating because these are supposedly top-tier engineering companies, yet their front-end deployment feels amateurish from a performance standpoint. When a site is this heavy, it’s not just a minor inconvenience; it's a sign of poor optimization.
A better path for AI workflows
If you want to build for the next decade, focus on a high-performance AI workflow where the site is lightweight and the data is structured. A practical tutorial for modern web dev should emphasize:
1. Minimal DOM depth: Stop nesting divs for the sake of "aesthetic" spacing.
2. CSS over JS for animations: Use hardware-accelerated CSS transitions rather than heavy JS libraries that fight for the main thread.
3. Semantic HTML: This is the best way to ensure both humans and LLM agents can scrape your site instantly.
We need to get back to basics. Just tell us what your company does. Don't make me wait for a 50MB JavaScript bundle to finish executing just so I can find your pricing page.