I don’t doubt it at all, but CSS and HTML are also about as commodity as it gets when it comes to development. I’ve never encountered a situation where a company is stuck for months on a difficult CSS problem and felt like we needed to call in a CSS expert, unlike most other specialty niches where top tier consulting services can provide a huge helpful push.

HTML + CSS is also one area where LLMs do surprisingly well. Maybe there’s a market for artisanal, hand-crafted, LLM-free CSS and HTML out there only from the finest experts in all the land, but it has to be small.

How do you measure „absolute top tier“ in CSS and HTML? Honest question. Can he create code for difficult-to-code designs? Can he solve technical problems few can solve in, say, CSS build pipelines or rendering performance issues in complex animations? I never had an HTML/CSS issue that couldn’t be addressed by just reading the MDN docs or Can I Use, so maybe I’ve missed some complexity along the way.

Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset that can be done “good enough” by AI for pennies for 99.9999% of customers is not a good place to be…