Comment by vunderba
10 months ago
Same. As somebody who doesn't really enjoy frontend work at all, they are surprisingly good at being able to spit out something that is relatively visually appealing - even if I'll end up rewriting the vast majority of react spaghetti code in Svelte.
I love front-end work, and I'm really good at it, but I now let the AI do CSS coding for me. It seems to make nice looking buttons and other design choices that are good enough for development. My designer has their own opinions, so they always will change the CSS when they get their hands on it, but at least I'm not wasting my time creating really ugly styles that always get replaced anymore. The rest of the coding is better if I do it, but sometimes the AI surprises me - though most often it gets it completely wrong, and then I'm wasting time letting it try and that just feels counterproductive. It's like a really stupid intern that almost never pays attention to what the goal is.
In the settings for Claude, I tell it to use Svelte and TypeScript whenever possible because I got tired of telling it I don't use React.
They're pretty good at following direction. For example you can say:
'Usw React, typescript, materialUi, prefer functions over const, don't use unnecessary semi colons, 4 spaces for tabs, build me a UI that looks like this sketch'
And it'll do all that.
If I need a quick mockup I’ll do it in react
But if I have time I’ll ask for it to be built using best practices from the programming language it’ll be built in as the final product whether that’s svelte, static astro, or even php
I’m not even seeing this react spaghetti code you’re referring to. It’s pretty impressive front ends with what looks like concise, well organized code.