...not in my experience. It does what I need it to do; center a div.
Why AI Sucks at Front End
51–60 of 183 posts
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#52Does this website run at 10fps for anyone else? I'm on a mac M4 w/ safari. Really doesn't help the author's point.
I thought it was just me. I'm running a M2 MacBook Pro and scrolling down the article on Safari is quite stuttery.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#53If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything.
I cant even actually receive good essay from it and still writing each word myself.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#54Does this website run at 10fps for anyone else? I'm on a mac M4 w/ safari. Really doesn't help the author's point.
Wow, it's got some issues on Chrome (dropped frames on scroll) but Safari is another level. Selecting text takes time. Looking at Activity Monitor, I see "Safari Graphics and Media" using 200% of my CPU even at rest.
A quick profile on Safari shows some layout recalc happening regularly, but surely that shouldn't cause this bad of perf...
The last time I found something like this, it was because of 100's of box-shadows.
Edit: Sure enough, this cures Safari:
*, *::before, *::after { box-shadow: none !important; background: none !important }
Edit 2: Ah, they're using shadow DOM for the img reflection, so we can't affect it. Good gravy is the shadow DOM stuff overwrought, it's 87 elements all told, just for one img.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#55I'm a backend dev and I'm always hearing about how LLMs are dramatically better at frontend because of much more available training data etc. Maybe my perspective isn't as skewed as I've been led to believe and LLMs need close supervision and rework of their output there too.
I would trust an LLM with backend much more than front-end. Especially if we're talking monolithic and good type system. Ideally compiled. When I say trust I mean it's not going to break the user-facing API contract, probably, even if internally it's a mess. If you let it do front-end blind, it will almost certainly embarrass you if you care at all about user experience.
If you do backend blind, it will also almost certainly embarrass you. I’ve never had an experience beyond the most basic crud app where I didn’t have to somehow use my engineering experience to dig it out of a hole.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#56Aside from the obvious "AI can't see" criticism, AI sucks at frontend because frontend sucks. Why does frontend suck? Churn.
To quote the article:
1. "It trained on ancient garbage" which is the by product of massive churn and this attitude leads to even more churn
2. "It doesn't know WHY we do things" because we don't either... even the paradigms used in frontend dev have needlessly churned
My fix? I switched from React/Next to Vue/Nuxt. The React ecosystem is by far the worst offender.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#57Everything is nuanced and generalizations help no one. There are absolutely frontend apps where AI straight up crushes. Sure these much be less novel apps but most of what people work on is a CRUD-esque interface.
I'm wondering what would be a specific example that AI would fail to create front-end wise, since I've been having quite good experiences with it.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would trust an LLM with backend much more than front-end. Especially if we're talking monolithic and good type system. Ideally compiled. When I say trust I mean it's not going to break the user-facing API contract, probably, even if internally it's a mess. If you let it do front-end blind, it will almost certainly embarrass you if you care at all about user experience.
If you do backend blind, it will also almost certainly embarrass you. I’ve never had an experience beyond the most basic crud app where I didn’t have to somehow use my engineering experience to dig it out of a hole.
Works mostly fine for me on Rust backends. As long as I'm willing to accept tight contracts at the edges with spaghetti in the middle, or otherwise gate approval for everything it does.
If I want good abstractions, sure, I can set up approvals and babysit it with reprompting, because it will do stupid things that an experienced engineer wouldn't. But the spaghetti also works in the sense that it takes the input types and largely correctly maps them to the output types.
That doesn't emarrass me with customers because they never see the internals. On front-end, obviously they will see and experience whatever abomination it cooks up directly.
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#59Design is an interesting beast. Good design is not always logical. Color theory, if followed, results in pretty bad experiences. And interestingly, good design can't always be explained in a natural language. Main thing is, it's very hard to get AI to have taste, because taste is not always statistically explainable. The best I've gotten to is have it use something like ShadCN (or another well document package that's…
I thought reinforcement learning with human feedback was meant to get that quantification of "taste"
Re: Why AI Sucks at Front End
#60If you are really good at something, you'll find AI sucks at everything.
No you don't understand, AI is VERY BAD at front-end and CSS to the point you cannot use anything. It's not passable even slightly. Everybody with experience knows that FE has always been "harder" than BE - but BE the stakes are higher since it's the business. FE is often "just UI" and despite that being very important too, you can throw it away and start over a lot easier with a UI than you can with a BE platform. I…
What is an example UI that AI would fail to create?