What Claude Code chooses

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Supreme irony: this website itself is a better exercise in showing what Claude Code uses than the data provided.

Everything current Claude Code i.e. Opus 4.6 chooses by default for web is exactly what this linked blog uses.

Jetbrains Mono is as strong of a tell for web as "Not just A, but B" for text. >99% of webpages created in the last month with Jetbrains Mono will be Opus. Another tell is the overuse of this font, i.e. too much of the page uses it. Other models, and humans, use such variants vary sparingly on web, whereas Opus slathers the page with it.

If you describe the content of the homepage or this article to Opus 4.6 without telling it about the styling, it will 90% match this website, upto the color scheme, fonts, roundings, borders and all. This is _the_ archetypical Opus vibecoded web frontend. Give it a try! If it doesn't work, try with the official frontend-ui-ux "skill" that CC tries to push on you.

> Drizzle 27/83 picks (32.5%) CI: 23.4–43.2%

> Prisma 17/83 picks (20.5%) CI: 13.2–30.4%

At least the abomination that is Prisma not ranking first is positive news, Drizzle was just in time of gaining steam. Not that it doesn't have its flaws, but out of the two it's a no-brainer. Also hilarious to see that the stronger the model, the less likely it's to choose Prisma - Sonnet 4.5 79% Prisma, Opus 4.5 60% Drizzle, Opus 4.6 100% Drizzle. One of the better benchmarks for intelligence I've come across!

Edit: Another currently on the HN frontpage: https://youjustneedpostgres.com/ , and there it is - lots and lots of Jetbrains Mono!

That's a good question, and I can't seem to think of what the maintainable solution that doesn't need as many tutorials would be.

CSS on its own is great, in a way, but also kind of awful if you don't fully grasp it. It used to be much worse, it got way better, but it still offers plenty of rough edges and foot guns.

Tailwind smooths some things over, but there are real tradeoffs. I prefer to use it quite often, but I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there. I don't think there's some perfect alternative hiding in obscurity, though. Tailwind is arguably popular because it often makes life easier. Not without drawbacks, but... I'd say it makes working on teams easier and there are a lot of community-generated themes, components, etc that make building things much faster and easier.

Hand rolled CSS is better if you're good at writing it, but in my experience, most people simply aren't.

Some people will disagree with me and say Tailwind is garbage, and that's fine, but they probably know CSS reasonably well. That makes a huge difference. Of the ~18M downloads per week, I would guess the vast majority of people using it have mostly copied and pasted stuff into their projects (or these days, let an LLM do it for them).

Depending on an analysis just like in the post.

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