[DGCA]

Frontend dev for 13+ years here. In my experience it’s pretty bad at anything but basic frontend stuff. I’ve tried all the models, editors, Claude code etc.

It’s constantly wrong about the simplest things. Just now it was hallucinating about CSS grid properties.

I’m convinced that how good AI seems is inversely correlated to someone’s knowledge in that domain, as you also mentioned.

Still super useful in my day to day but I have to hand hold and correct it constantly.

[anonzzzies]

I am very bad at frontend and I know frontend peeps keep saying claude/llms are bad at it, but now, for the first time in my 40 year career, I deliver frontend that are looking better and functioning better than whatever I see in hip products people 'designed with love in blah'. And our clients agree. If the css is correct or not, I don't know as I never really found the energy to learn it and now I don't need to and can focus on the business logic. The endresults look and work phenomenal: not sure why I would care if the css is the best. Especially nice when I have been using something for a long time and some things I always found lacking: now I add them in in minutes: auto completion here, move creation inline there, add drag and drop: ah but on mobile make it like that. Everything just works and in hours vs days or weeks it was before.

[mavamaarten]

I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is.

I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a fire breaks out.

I get it - the hype is based around the quick gains you can absolutely have. The gains are insane, I have been able to be more productive at boilerplate and repetitive tasks too. But just building software isn't hard. Building software that lasts, building software that is rock solid, efficient and maintainable, that's hard!

It's sickening to me how quickly people want to throw that in the garbage. All because it saves a few $ in development time, quality is suddenly a metric that is completely ignored, rather than weighed in.

It's going to bite people in the ass.

[dreadnip]

I guess the main takeaway is that you don’t care about the quality of the generated code. The end result is all that matters.

If I ask it to “add drag & drop”, I already know in my mind what the correct code should look like, because I’ve implemented it many times in the past. LLMs just never deliver the -code- that I want. The end result might look ok and the drag & drop will work, but the code will be atrocious and on first glance I can pick out 10-20 mistakes that I’ll have to ask it to fix. And even if I ask for a fix, I’ll never get the same code quality as hand written code. And how can I push this kind of sub-par code to an employer’s repo when I know that I can (and should) write better quality code myself. This is what I’m being paid for right?

[DGCA]

Are you implementing designs that were given to you or having AI generate the design as well? I could see it being better at the latter.