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Comment by bko

6 days ago

One thing I thought would have been incredibly useful for me is to go from HTML -> Figma

There is a ton of focus on going from Figma to something you could presumably dump into react or html. But I found nothing in the reverse.

Realistically, for a lot of applications, there are more things in production than in Figma. It's just not practical to spec everything out when you're moving fast. But when you do want someone to look at it or tinker, it's a huge lift to migrate your current production to Figma. I wish they would use some AI for that. Just take a webpage, and build the Figma design docs. Doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to get help from designers

13 comments

bko

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snarf21  5 days ago

The feature we need most is Figma > SwiftUI, etc. The ability to take the Figma UIs and export to web and mobile would be such a time saver.

  • zenmac  5 days ago

    jsx-lite had it in experimental mode for a while: https://github.com/lamppkk/jsx-lite

    Anyone with good SwiftUIfu care to take over? Then hopefully jsx-lite gets submitted to the ES specs like E4X. Then we can have UI write once and runs in all places.

berkes  6 days ago

Ah yes Dreamweaver. Look how well that turned out.

Turs out people don't want "quick dump as HTML" but rather "maintainable, understandable, performant HTML". I don't see how that has changed with AI.

  • cluckindan  6 days ago

    Dreamweaver was a widely used tool back in the day and definitely started a trend in web design tools.

    • berkes  6 days ago

      It certainly did. It was the OG of "no-code" or "low-code".

      But like no-code or low-code, the niche in which it's useful to a business is limited. I commonly say that if software (esp FLOSS) serves even only one person well, it's a success. By that criteria, it was massively successfull.

      But 27 years later, we are still mostly writing "html" (or jxl, or whatever todays frontendframework has come up with) by "hand". Or writing code that churns out this HTML for us. And not dragging around stuff in Dreamweaver.

      Some figma-export will serve niches, some of which I probably cannot imagine even. Prototyping, one-offs, cousin-erik-building-james-craft-brewery-site, etc. But even combined with generative- or transformative AI, it won't serve as the source for UI "code".

  • hnlmorg  6 days ago

    If by “people” you mean “developers”, then yes you’re right. But I don’t think anyone else ever really cared.

    The problem with Dreamweaver is that you still needed a developer to upload and run the site. And back then, you couldn’t run single page applications (web stacks hadn’t evolved that far yet), so still needed developers to write the backend.

    Thus there wasn’t a huge amount to gain in using Dreamweaver for the professional world.

    AI has changed that in that it doesn’t have the same limitations as Dreamweaver. However, like yourself, I don’t think we’ll see AI replace developers. Or at least the current crop of LLMs still have a long way to go before they can be used without developer oversight.

    Edit: also worth noting that Flash was everywhere back then too. So many web designers opted for Flash instead.

    • berkes  6 days ago

      I actually do see developers being replaced by AI. But only certain roles and only after it solves the issues that e.g. Dreamweaver did not solve.

      Building stuff from scratch is easy. AI can do it, dreamweaver could, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, etc.

      Maintaining legacy isn't. AI isn't there yet: at most it can replace existing with new, but it cannot "understand" context, history, The Reason Why Kevin Built This Weird Unintelligable Abstraction, or how the three different ways of validating an email are actually a business requirement.

      Let alone building stuff that withstands the decay of real constraints and time.

      I've been around long enough (30+ years software dev/engineer) to have seen this decay over and over and to know what works and what doesn't (It's a people issue, hardly a technical one).

      I've never seen AI, that sweatshop worker on fiverr, newest junior hire, or any low- or no-code tool, amongst which Dreamweaver, churn out something that's easy to change, maintainable for months, years, decades.

      There's software that gets a few hours a year of attention and keeps running, securely, performant. That can be picked up, changed or added to and deployed in hours. And there's software that will explode the moment you even glance at the files, let alone anyone fixing, updating, or g*d forbid, adding features to.

      AI generated stuff almost exclusively falls in the last category. And we don't have anything AI around yet that can do this fixing, updating, adding features for us.

      So currently it successfully replaces many of the code monkeys, fiverr-freelancers and junior devs churning out forever-greenfield-projects. But little else.

      2 replies →

edoceo  6 days ago

Take your current project, then run `figma-cli-ai --fix` and have a modern design.