alt Hacker NewsClaude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM. On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don't support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn't let Claude write the code. With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:
- Read an .icc file from disk
- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)
- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs
The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).
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> Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things
Because the rendered output (pixels, not HTML/CSS) is not fed as data in the training. You will find tons of UI snippets and questions, but they rarely included screenshots. And if they do, the are not scraped.
Why is this something a Wayland compositor (a glorified window manager) needs to worry about? Apple figured this out back in the 1990s with ColorSync and they did it once for the Mac OS and any application that wanted colour management could use the ColorSync APIs.
Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.