There's clearly room for improvement there, you're right, but I'd also say these kinds of tasks are severely underconstrained, and if you have a certain image of how it should look in mind, you should give it a lot of references, especially if UI is complex. Screenshots, figma, sketches, references to existing design, etc. And even then there's probably going to be a few iterations.

I've had a pretty good experience tampering with existing UI without taking time of the frontend team, but depending on the scale and your abilities, some things may indeed be faster manually still

On one hand they can't see. Haven't seen a "give me an svg unicorn" test since a while, but I guess their performance hasn't changed a lot. If you give broad prompts, then that will result usually in some garbage.

As an anecdata, a few weeks ago I was creating some UI with libSDL for an embedded project with Claude, and I was quite impressed with the result. Granted, I specified everything I could think about: I instructed it page by page, iterating button by button and label by label.

what, exactly, were the failures?

coding assistants are not visual-first, they are code-first. so it makes sense that they excel more at coding.

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