It's build-time, Rust/Oxc, type-safe, zero-runtime CSS-in-JS, with per-route CSS splitting.
- Nimble: https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css/demo/pico.html
- Sumi.css: https://vladocar.github.io/Sumi.css/docs.html
- Blades: https://github.com/anyblades/blades
- Oat: https://oat.ink/
Ios 13.6 in my case, which was released just 6 yrs ago, 2020. For some context, flexbox gap was added in ios14.1, released in 2021.
People keep forgetting that css3 was announced in 1999. And adoption roughly started from 2010. The css3 of that time is not the same as css3 you get to see in latest browsers. These minimal css frameworks are really useless if you don’t know what css3 features you are writing and who you are targeting.
And, I Haven’t even tested those in less capable browsers like dillo or netsurf, but I doubt they will even work there.
If you start looking into browser market share, you will quickly realise that there are millions of worldwide users who can’t use the web normally.
Ever since Coding Assistant LLMs became pretty good (2025-Q4 - 2026-Q1), I feel that it makes very little sense to continue to use pre-defined CSS Frameworks that 'has everything.' Of course, it is still OK if the general team decides on one, and they are OK (such as the Tailwinds, MUI of the frontend world.)
I have used Foundation[1] and Bourbon[2] extensively. Mostly because I can break it down and take just what the project needs and keep it within a low CSS budget for any project.
With that in mind, in the 10+ projects that started for some of the biggest brands of the world, I just defined the CSS framework, design systems, design token, with room for extension as the project grows. Claude Code is my tool of choice for now and I just let it run overnight, tweak as the project scaffolds and finally takes about less than a week to have a complete CSS framework in just plain CSS, and JavaScript where it needs to talk to the broader frontend.
Thank you Lucas Larroche for building Pico CSS and sharing it with us.
We’re actively maintaining Blades CSS on GitHub and Discord, and would love Community feedback there.
We also set up a dedicated page outlining key details: https://blades.dev/css/pico/
Do people actually use this? In particular, before LLMs ate the world, I mean. When I did frontend, it was hex, or if you felt fancy, `rgba(...)` (though at that point named colours had mostly fallen out of style).
Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables?
RGB is fine for specifying a color. I mean, there are issues with RGB colorspaces and whatnot, but if you need to pick the background of a page or the color of text, there's no real reason not to use RGB.
The problem with RGB is that it is really bad at color interpolation. You can't take the average of the red, green, and blue components of two colors and expect a usable color in the middle to come out. Instead, you need to move to a perceptual color space. CIELAB is the old perceptual color space of choice; Oklab is the new perceptual color space of choice.
Color interpolation is needed for things like gradients or information visualization, where you need to say things like "20% of the way between color A and color B".
Yes. OKLCH is actually MORE intuitive when creating shades because it's based around human perception. It also supports wide color spaces like P3, where rgba is, IIRC, bound to sRGB.
The utility of these color spaces and color functions isn't lost just because LLM. Color systems haven't gone anywhere.
Would highly recommend reading up on OKLCH if you haven't already. A lot of people put a lot of effort into promoting this and bringing it to baseline..
So in my case where color shifting is happening, Oklab actually helps. I don’t know how it’s better than HSL for simple UI elements unless maybe you can get physically brighter values that pop out more on certain screens.
This started way back working with my long-term business partner and he built a pretty good tool to help visualize and tinker with it.
Website https://colorcolor.in
Do people actually use this?
I love OKLCH. Awkward to say, beautiful to look at.
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rg...
Thank you to the developer and maintainer
For what it’s worth I had to force Claude early in to use pico and not ever generate react or ornate tailwind.
Pico is extraordinary for standalone tools where ai can’t let complexity build out of control.
Maybe there’s other options but pico is what got it done, and vanilla LLMs has a hard time keeping something this simple and elegant and flexible.
Does anyone know a similar project doing this?
Already plain modern CSS instead of Sass, has Popover API, and CSS layers for individual components, OKLCH colors are on the way.
Drop-in compatible with Pico CSS (via underlying fork)
Why? Why? Why? I hate how everyone seems convinced they need to adopt the latest and greatest browser features just to stay relevant. I hate oklch and I hate Tailwind popularized it. I don't care how scientifically accurate it is at representing human color perception. It's a PITA to understand a new type of color system, and learn to tweak it, especially when HSL/RGB just worked fine.