alt Hacker NewsDoes anybody here have a frontend development workflow that works well with coding agents? In my experience coding agents ship buggy, broken, incomplete, or awkward frontend features at a way higher frequency than they do for backend features. The reason seems obviously to be the difference in verifiability between the two. Basic test suites dont seem to help much. I assume something like Garry Tan’s gstack is the right direction but I dont know if that particular tool is mature enough to adopt yet. I was surprised too see here on HN recently that gemini 3.5 flash may outperform Opus/gpt-5.5 on frontend tasks (maybe because of Gemini’s supposed edge w.r.t. multimodality? or maybe it understands Chrome more deeply?), can anyone here second that take?
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Agents aren't great at complex async state updates, mostly because it's hard to represent what's happening in their context. They're fine at creating complex components in isolation and implementing decoupled stuff like animations.
There may be good options coupled with agents like Claudes Front End Design skill, I haven't used it.
I have been using Magic Patterns which is very good at generating initial prototypes, especially when driven by an agent familiar with it's facilities and constraints.
I assume the service is just a wrapper plus scaffolding but I like it. You have to push it though to get anything particularly creative but it's good at standard front end designs.
https://www.magicpatterns.com/
That's not necessarily what you're after because I only use it for piloting stuff, not for adhoc feature addition and fixes.