🖥 Midjourney engineer open-sources Pretext for layout without CSS

A Midjourney engineer released Pretext, an open-source algorithm that handles text layout without CSS, DOM, or browser reflow. It computes layout directly with math instead of relying on traditional rendering pipelines.

This removes cascading styles and dependency chains, which often trigger heavy recalculations when content changes. The result is up to 500x faster layout in dynamic scenarios.

The approach fits emerging interfaces where content is generated on the fly, especially agent-driven UIs that rebuild structure step by step.

Layout is starting to move from browser logic into direct algorithms.

github.com/chenglou/pretext

📊 @tech