Comment by onion2k
18 hours ago
The last couple of websites I've made have been largely the output of Claude with some instructions to keep to WCAG AAA accessibility standards and to optimize for loading and rendering times, and it's done a pretty decent job. If you're insistent about page weight it will avoid adding JS and React and use to browser-native elements, CSS, and vanilla JS where it can.
I think the problem is that you have to ask, and to know the language to get the result you're after. If you just ask for a pretty website you're getting 800KB of React libraries to render something, and all in AI Beige with Inter as your font choice.
Do you really need to know the language or is it enough to bother asking about improving the loading time or customizing the look?
You need to know.
Here's an isochrone map renderer I got Claude to make: https://benwheatley.github.io/Isochrone/web/?region=berlin&s...
One of the failure modes was it running out of GPU RAM because it tried to allocate (multiple!) pixel buffers on a m-pixels-per-n-real-world-meters basis(!), and repeatedly didn't see the problem with this despite it being a vector graph on a normal screen.
I only even noticed this bug due to another bug where it got the bounding box for Portsmouth badly wrong by including the entire length of the ferry routes to France.
If I didn't understand how to use the JS console, it would have been stuck saying "I can't reproduce the problem"; and if I didn't understand the way computer graphics work I wouldn't have been able to recognise that multi-gigabyte pixel buffers are not normal, nor would I have been able to recognise that in this case those particular buffers were totally redundant.