Comment by lherron
3 days ago
You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
3 days ago
You really have to a) use Opus and b) use the frontend-design skill for decent results.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
I have seen so many brown sites that look all the same, all designed by this thing most likely. So no.
Agreed. It's not that the designs it produces are bad necessarily, they're just very same-y. People often talk about the bootstrap era, but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole).
The comparison is pretty accurate though. The moment anyone dared to stray from the bootstrap defaults is when the whole thing would go to shit.
Every steaming pile said less about the development effort and so much more about the project management. This same boneheaded top-down approach is why AI isn't working for anyone without being willing to pour as much effort into babysitting as just writing the damn code yourself.
Old adages continue to ring true and as loud as ever. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
> but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole)
They were, at least for that era. Just maybe not at AI-scale.
1 reply →
claude slop :D
The frontend-design skill defeats its own purpose imo. The design equivalent of "it's not x, it's y."
It's load-bearing though.
You just need a few more smoke tests and you'll be fine.
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> Remember: Claude is capable of extraordinary creative work. Don't hold back, show what can truly be created when thinking outside the box and committing fully to a distinctive vision.
Manifestation for LLMs. :)
Stuart Smalley (snl) must have written it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMRX-Wj2WOk
I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!", and this is it?
> NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character.
> brutally minimal, maximalist chaos, retro-futuristic, organic/natural, luxury/refined, playful/toy-like, editorial/magazine, brutalist/raw, art deco/geometric, soft/pastel, industrial/utilitarian
> React, Vue
Sorry, but this is garbage.
"make unexpected choices that feel genuinely designed for the context."
What is it supposed to do when fed instructions like this?
I think it's very clear what it's supposed to do from that text. Just read it at face value.
Whether it does anything useful or not is another matter. I don't think Anthropic or anyone else is doing evals on these skills, and for something subjective like design that would be especially hard anyway.
In other words, does this skill actually change the designs you get out in a positive way, consistently? Who knows? But it's certainly good marketing for Anthropic that whenever agentic web design gets brought up, someone will definitely mention this skill and confidently claim that they get better results by using it, without anything except social proof to back that up.
For years I would use free fonts and spend hours picking them out and getting depressed because they all had something wrong with them…. You get what you pay for.
For a recent project I really liked a font which was in the Adobe Fonts collection and when I had to set stuff in that font with Pillow I gladly bought the font from the foundry because it looks great and saves hours of searching for a “free” font, that is “free” as in puppy.
I've been wondering for a while if ignoring most of that bubble and whatever it cooks up might be a wrong move on my part.
Glad to see that it's just noise.
I suppose the biggest effects these skills have is to prime the user to expect something positive.
Actually kinda like what we do with LLMs. Just put a word in their context window and they suddenly start behaving different because probabilities changed.
Everyone should read through the (very short) skill file. Are we supposed to be this naive or dimwitted? LLM marketing is a transparent swindle at this point.
I've had better results with this, when it comes to functional UIs rather than marketing sites: https://github.com/Dammyjay93/interface-design
Found it on reddit after Claude produced the lamest looking generic forms for all the pages on a project I had it build. This did a pass over it and basically fixed it all one shot.
>Apply the squint test to your work:
>Blur your eyes or step back >Can you still perceive hierarchy? >Is anything jumping out at you?
Telling an eyeless clanker to "blur your eyes" is just so ridiculous. "Is anything jumping out at you?" That's quite a thing for a machine to reason about, and reads like a waste of tokens. I'm not sure who is writing these things, but they seem rather clueless.
Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user interfaces.
I'm pretty sure I'd have better luck just telling the LLM explicitly what I want, because experience in UI/UX is still better than what an LLM would slop out on its own.
Looking at the examples on that page: Claude really is in love with browns and oranges, isn't it.
“Redesign the site using frotend-design skill”
https://race-to-270.vercel.app/
Why is everything so....wide?
Try this if you have access to Claude Design, go to sites you like, grab the html/css and a few screenshot and ask it to build a project, it makes an almost 1:1 reproduction. place those files into ur frontend project
Fable was really good at design as well just off the bat without any skills. Seems like Anthropic explicitly trained it for frontend.
frontend-design skill was a game changer to me, especially for copying styles from websites i like
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