alt Hacker NewsWho says it sucks at front end? Unlike Stackoverflow, AI does a great job of "center a div." I tend to like working from reference documentation which is great for Python and Java but challenging for CSS where you have to navigate roughly 50 documents that relate to each other in complex ways to find answers.
Like I don't give it 100% responsibility for front end tasks but I feel like working together with AI I feel like I am really in control of CSS in a way I haven't been before. If I am using something like MUI it also tends to do really good at answering questions and making layouts.
Thing is, I don't treat AI as an army of 20 slaves will get "shit" done while I sleep but rather as a coding buddy. I very much anthropomorphize it with lots of "thank you" and "that's great!" and "does this make sense?", "do you have any questions for me?" and "how would you go about that?" and if makes me a prototype of something I will ask pointed questions about how it works, ask it to change things, change the code manually a bit to make it my own, and frequently open up a library like MUI in another IDE window and ask Junie "how do i?" and "how does it work when I set prop B?"
It doesn't 10x my speed and I think the main dividend from using it for me is quality, not compressed schedule, because I will use the speed to do more experiments and get to the bottom of things. Another benefit is that it helps me manage my emotional energy, like in the morning it might be hard for me to get started and a few low-effort spikes are great to warm me up.
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CSS has definitely become a breeze to work with since LLMs have become a thing. Conceptually it's very "memorize how a billion possible combinations of obscure parameters interact with one another under various conditions" kind of setup so it's a perfect fit for machines and a terrible fit for humans.
The main limitation I think is that they're blind as a bat and don't understand how things stand visually and render in the end. Even the best VLMs are still complete trash and can't even tell if two lines intersect. Slapping on an encoder post training doesn't do anything to help with visual understanding, it just adds some generic features the text model can react to.
I still struggle with the design, but once that's locked in getting it to implement things is pretty straightforward. I do have to fight the AI a bit to make sure things are simple and clean, but it's pretty good at that with the right hand-holding.
The design is still a problem though, precisely because I am not a designer. I don't know what's actually good, I only know what's good enough for me. I can't tell the difference between "this is actually good" and "this is vibe-designed slop" but I have enough experience to at least make sure the implementation is robust.