Tailwind and slop apps
briandouglas.ie
Tailwind and slop apps
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Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#2Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" framework even though they were capable of writing the CSS from scratch. Now LLMs have trained on this boring cookie-cutter UI work so no one should be surprised that this is what comes out.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#3Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" fra…
> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap
Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#4https://impeccable.style/slop/ is a great approach to identifying slop
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#5Anyone have good lines to include in a prompt to direct LLMs from their default tailwind/Linear/etc. design modes on the first shot?
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#6I agree there is a "sameness" that you get from tailwind.
Tailwind has a unique benefit in that you can change the CSS of the page and just that page. There is no chance that you make a change that breaks the rest of the site because you wrote a rule wrong. In some environments/applications this is a big deal.
But honestly that's the only credit i'll give it. The class names are still confusing to me and you do get more flexibility with CSS. And i'd rather be writing classless css and targeting custom HTML elements anyway.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#7Anyone have good lines to include in a prompt to direct LLMs from their default tailwind/Linear/etc. design modes on the first shot?
I know this may be a bit dismissive, but I think the need to ask that is the problem. AI can definitely build a design for you. But is no substitute for design skill.
The best way to figure out how to prompt an LLM is to develop design skills so you know what to tell it.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#8Tailwind is the latest bootstrap. These frameworks were designed to allow people with no skill in design/UI to produce something that passed for attractive. Since most clients are more concerned about time and cost than quality and originality, this approach effectively killed bespoke landing pages and led a lot of UI devs to move away from hand-coding styles to glomming on class names and using a "best practice" fra…
> Tailwind is the latest bootstrap Bootstrap ships components. AFAIK you need another library if you want that in Tailwind.
But the point of the comment is that both Bootstrap and Tailwind are facilitators when you don't know/want/care about getting your hands dirty with CSS. Tailwind happens to be a little less abstract than Bootstrap, but still you're not fiddling with "low level" CSS.
That abstraction is what brings the "sameness" factor in play, though.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#9Anyone have good lines to include in a prompt to direct LLMs from their default tailwind/Linear/etc. design modes on the first shot?
I know this may be a bit dismissive, but I think the need to ask that is the problem. AI can definitely build a design for you. But is no substitute for design skill. The best way to figure out how to prompt an LLM is to develop design skills so you know what to tell it.
I totally hear what you’re saying.
I’ve been in the industry a long time. Even before LLMs, I think web design would get stuck in cycles. So I just want it to spit out something that looks novel and interesting, which pushes me to coach it even better.
Re: Tailwind and slop apps
#10Anyone have good lines to include in a prompt to direct LLMs from their default tailwind/Linear/etc. design modes on the first shot?
"No dependencies. Vanilla HTML/JS/CSS".