# Remembering The Grid

Source: https://www.dandenney.com/blips/remembering-the-grid
Date: 2026-07-09
Summary: A team in 2014 knew we'd be where we are today

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Every so often I remember [The Grid](https://thegrid.io) and it hit me tonight.

Back in 2014, they promised something that sounded impossible: an AI that would design websites for you. Upload your content. Describe what you wanted. Let the system handle the layout, typography, imagery, and visual hierarchy.

I remember being equal parts skeptical and excited. 

Excited because it aligned with something I'd felt for a long time. The code itself has never been the part I cared about most. What I wanted was to get ideas into a browser as quickly as possible. If something could shorten the time between an idea and a working experience, I wanted it.

The Grid couldn't quite deliver on that promise. What they called "AI" was really a collection of handcrafted rules, heuristics, constraint solvers, and image analysis. The unlock of "transformers" was still a dream of someone else's.

However, they weren't wrong, they were just about ten years early.

So, I was curious what they're doing now that it's "here"

Dan Tocchini is still exploring computational creativity and AI systems. Brian Axe moved into healthcare technology leadership. Henri Bergius continues to build open-source systems and flow-based programming tools. Leigh Taylor was one of Medium's first designers.

What's funny is that over the past week I've been building how they imagined. Fable is levels of magnitude further than the other models for UI and so I've been doing daily experiments. As I write this, my current one is: Building secondary pages… (32m 20s · ↓ 124.5k tokens)

Instead of writing every line by hand, I describe what I want. I iterate with prompts. I generate prototypes, refine them, throw them away, and generate new ones. The browser has become a canvas for ideas instead of just a destination for code.

The destination that the team envisioned turned out to be right.

I think The Grid deserves to be remembered because it accurately predicted where it was heading. Sometimes the hardest part isn't having the vision. It's surviving long enough for the technology to catch up.