Comment by K0nserv
3 days ago
Having worked on a design system previously I think most people, especially non-frontend developers, discount how hard something like that is to build. LLMs will build stuff that looks plausible but falls short in a bunch of ways (particularly accessibility). This is for the same reason that people generate div-soup, it looks correct on the surface.
EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is that "The paid products Adam mentions are the pre-made components and templates, right? It seems like the bigger issue isn't reduced traffic but just that AI largely eliminates the need for such thing." is wrong. My hunch is that AI has the appearance of eliminating the need for such things.
I think you're overestimating how much people care about quality.
If you can produce something that works 80% of the time for 5% of the cost? People take that all the time when they buy cheap shit off Temu or Amazon.
They almost completely just give money back if it fails/sucks, and they are still coming out ahead.
Amazon (AWS) is not cheap! :D
It's not that people care about quality, but that people expect things to "just work".
Regarding the point about accessibility, there are a ton of little details that must be explicitly written into the HTML that aren't necessarily the default behavior. Some common features of CSS and JS can break accessibility too.
None of this code would obvious to an LLM, or even human devs, but it's still what's expected. Without precisely written and effectively read-only boilerplate your webpage is gonna be trash and the specifics are a moving target and hotly debated. This back and forth is a human problem, not a code problem. That's why it's "hard".
I use the web every day as a blind user with a screenreader.
I would 100% of the time prefer to encounter the median website written by Opus 4.5 than the median website written by a human developer in terms of accessibility!
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Knowing obscure things you need to do for accessibility is actually something I would expect an llm to be pretty good at.
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Accessibility is an interesting space for quality because under the ADA you can be sued for it and be exposed to huge liability.
But accessiblity on the frontend is to a large extend patterns - if it looks like a checkbox it should have the appropriate ARIA tag, and patterns are easy for an LLM.
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Accessibility testing sounds like something an LLM might be good at. Provide it with tools to access your website only through a screen reader (simulated, text not audio), ask it to complete tasks, measure success rate. That should be way easier for an LLM than image-based driving a web browser.
Oh no I'm very cynical about that.
I think perhaps the nuance in the middle here is that for most projects, the quality that professional components bring is less important.
Internal tools and prototypes, both things that quality components can accelerate, have been strong use-cases for these component libraries, just as much as polished commercial customer-facing products.
And I bet volume-wise there's way more of the former than the latter.
So while I think most people who care about quality know you can't (yet) blindly use LLM output in your final product, it's completely ok for internal tools and prototyping.
LLMs are not that cheaper, a customizable accessible component is still worth hours of work.
The Tailwind Team's Refactoring UI book was a big eye opener for me. I had no idea how many subtle insights are required to create truly effective UX.
I think people vastly underestimate just how much work goes into determining the correct set of primitives create a design system like Tailwind, let alone a full blown component library like TailwindUI.
While I believe you, its an argument that artists bring forward since the beginning of art, so even many hundred years before the internet on average humankind did not value this work.
> design system ... discount how hard something like that is to build.
This is probably a good thing. The web would be much better off with fewer design systems.
It's not that hard to build a design system with decent accessibility. Just use shadcn ui components instead of rolling your own.
It's not really a refutation of my point about how building a good component library is hard, to suggest using another component library. Of course, if you use one it's easier, that was my entire point.
shadcn ui is not a component library but the basis for a component library that has great accessibility built-in from the start, so yes, it is a refutation.
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