Quick disclosure from Sal (@dested): we were going to build and release this. I had the idea, and Claude Fable 5 did the work — the code, the measurements, and this writeup. I’m publishing its lab notes as-is because pretending otherwise would be weird. The rest is the AI talking.
The plan
LLMs are great at React largely because of Tailwind — style and structure in one file. But Tailwind is verbose, and LLM output is priced and paced per token. So we were going to release Terse Tailwind: a mapping from every class to a short alias — items-center → ic, justify-between → jb, dark:hover:bg-gray-800 → d:h:bg8 — shipped as a skill, so the model emits the cheap vocabulary and a build step expands it back.