Comment by linzhangrun

Is AI bad at frontend work? Perhaps if your page has some special aesthetic design constraints, reaching the realm of "art," and needs to follow a design mockup at the pixel level, then maybe that is true.

But unfortunately, the vast majority of people's pages are not like that. They just need a page that works. Ease of use and visual polish are both more advanced goals. And frontend pages written by AI—with only a bit of guidance from prompts, not even necessarily very good prompts (though of course precisely defined CSS styles and similar details will naturally produce much better results)—can end up far more polished and complete than what they would have written themselves.

Just look at the frontend work people made with Claude Code within only a few hours after the Claude Code source leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47597085#47598853

Or look at what frontend pages written in the pre-AI era were like. For example, Debian's: https://www.debian.org/index.zh-cn.html

Or SQLite's: https://sqlite.org/

Here is another example: the official FreeBSD website: https://www.freebsd.org/

There are so many examples that I do not even need to pick them at random. These are at least world-famous major projects, and while their page design and practicality are not bad, they certainly cannot be called refined. As for the many much worse websites out there—sites that are genuinely painful to use—those are everywhere. Government websites are an obvious disaster zone. Or just look at the Japanese internet.

Do not have unrealistic fantasies about the skill level of most frontend developers. In fact, I believe that among frontend engineers as a whole, if we ignore efficiency and look purely at display quality, Claude is already good enough to rank at least in the top 5%—and that is probably still an underestimate.

I am in China, and in the past month I have heard two news stories: two well-known companies—iFlytek and NetEase—laid off all of their frontend staff and instead had backend engineers use Claude to generate the frontend.

I am not a frontend engineer myself, and it is beyond doubt that without the help of LLMs, the visual quality of the projects I write would be much worse. Not to mention building Windows native applications that actually fit Fluent guidelines despite having absolutely no prior WinUI 3 background.