Comment by justinko

3 days ago

Same. It’s amazing for frontend.

As a front-of-the-frontend guy, I think it's terrible with CSS and SVG and just okay with HTML.

I work at a shop where we do all custom frontend work and it's just not up to the task. And, while it has chipped in on some accessibility features for me, I wouldn't trust it to do that unsupervised. Even semantic HTML is a mixed bag: if you point out something is a figure/figcaption it'll probably do it right, but I haven't found that it'll intuit these things and get it right on the first try.

But I'd imagine if you don't care about the frontend looking original or even good, and you stick really closely to something like tailwind, it could output something good enough.

And critically, I think a lot of times the hardest part of frontend work is starting, getting that first iteration out. LLMs are good for that. Actually got me over the hump on a little personal page I made a month or so ago and it was a massive help. Put out something that looked terrible but gave me what I needed to move forward.

It's astonishing. A bit scary actually. Can easily see the role of front-end slowly morphing into a single person team managing a set of AI tools. More of an architecture role.

Is this because they had the entire web to train on, code + output and semantics in every page?

  • I guess it’s because modern front-end “development” is mostly about copying huge amounts of pointless boilerplate and slightly modifying it, which LLMs are really good at.

  • It's moreso that a backend developer can now throw together a frontend and vice-versa without relying on a team member or needing to set aside time to internalize all the necessary concepts to just make that other part of the system work. I imagine even a full-stack developer will find benefits.

  • I’m not sure how this was extended and refined but there are sure a lot of signs of open source code being used heavily (at least early on). It would make sense to test model fit with the web at large.