Comment by linzhangrun
2 days ago
However, it is obvious that if it were humans, even several hours would clearly not be enough time to create not only a visually stunning website but even a basic one, such as the pure text site introducing Lua itself (https://www.lua.org/manual/5.5/) (which achieves such visual presentation by uniformly using a set of templates designed by Lua itself)—that's very difficult, isn't it? Given the author one or two days, I believe most those detail issues mentioned in the comments could be fixed. Most problems stem from the "rush to release a half-finished product within a few hours to gain traffic" approach. Of course, such impatience is a common issue in many VibeCoding projects, like OpenClaw, but this is not a problem with AI's capability to write front-end code.
I mean, there's a fundamental missing understanding of how to build a coherent design, then there's also the problem of just poor implementation such as the animations.
The Lua site has some problems as well, like an uncessary border, text size and spacing, even when it's this minimal. You can get much faster and better results from using or taking inspiration from something like Astro Starlight or UnoCSS
Astro Starlight: https://starlight.astro.build/
UnoCSS: https://unocss.dev/
But of course, I agree that with AI you can create websites much faster, but it doesn't replace the knowledge needed to build a "good website".
Yes, that is what I mean: most front-end work does not require exceptional creativity or especially polished visual effects. Many people comment that AI-generated pages are extremely mediocre, but that “mediocre” result is already quite good in practice. In the software-related examples I mentioned, whether it is Debian, FreeBSD, SQLite, or Lua—and even Python’s official site, which I would already consider one of the better examples in this category—the visual quality clearly does not reach the same level as the supposedly “mediocre” output generated by AI.
These are already some of the best projects in the world. At least their front-end interfaces still show traces of a coherent design language. As for what the broader landscape looks like, I do not think that needs much explanation. This is not really a matter of capability. It is simply that, before AI, people were generally unwilling to spend more effort on these pages. For people in the pre-AI era, this was already good enough.
Of course, websites for front-end-related tools tend to look better. Besides the two examples you mentioned, sites like Vue and Bun also look quite good. Even so, I do not think they necessarily have any significant visual advantage over what Claude generates.
Let’s return to the title: “Why AI Sucks at Front End?” Does Claude produce genuinely awful page designs? If so, then are not all the examples above—and many, many more—also quite awful by the same standard? That alone is enough to challenge the premise of the question. To criticize AI-generated pages for “lacking innovative design” and being “too mediocre” is really an overly rarefied standard. It forgets what most of the world’s front-end actually looks like, does it not?
Suddenly remembered, isn't Hacknews itself the best counterexample of frontend design? Deliberately minimal styling to ensure content focus, lol :P I believe generating https://news.ycombinator.com with Claude should be a piece of cake.