Comment by derefr

The thing is, we've already had "working mockup generators" — a.k.a. prototyping tools — for decades now.

If you come at the problem from the direction of "I draw a user interface; you guess what it's supposed to do and wire it up for me", then all you need to solve that problem (to a first-order approximation) is some plain-old 1970s "AI" heuristics.

The buzz around current AI coding prompting seems to be solely generated by the fact that while prototyping tools require you to at least have some training as a designer (i.e. understanding the problem you're solving on the level of inputs and outputs), these tools allow people with no experience in programming or design to get results. (Mainly by doing for UIs what genAI image/video tools do for art: interpolating the average of many ingested examples of how a designer would respond to a client request for X, with no regard for the designer's personal style†.)

† Unless prompted to have such regard... but if you know enough to tell the AI how to design everything, then you may as well just design everything. Just as, if you know art well enough to prompt an AI into developing a unique art style, then you likely know art well enough to just make that same art yourself with less effort than it takes to prompt and re-prompt and patch-erase-infill-prompt the AI into drawing what you want.