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Comment by throwaway-11-1 | Hacker News Reader

"ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad? I understand that more than anything engineers believe having to spend money on design is a total waste, but none of this is pleasing or balanced at all

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Just from personal experience, visual design is the task with the worst outcomes for Claude Code (w/ latest Opus 4.1, etc).

It truly cannot reason well yet about geometry, visual aesthetics, placement, etc. The performance varies: it's quite good at matplotlib but terrible at any non-trivial LaTeX / TikZ layout or graphic. Why? Not a clear idea yet -- would love to think more about it.

I've tried many things now to try and give it eyes (via text), and this is unavoidably a place where things are ... rough ... right now.

I've had bad results with image screenshotting. More often than not, it has no idea what it is looking at -- won't even summarize the image correctly -- or will give me an incorrect take "Yes indeed we fixed the problem as you can tell by <this part of the UI> and <that part of the UI>" which is wrong.

I typically have to come in and make a bunch of fine-grained changes to get something visually appealing. I'm sure at some point we'll have a system which can go all the way, and I'd be excited to find approaches to this problem.

Note -- tasks which involve visual design which I've run into diminishing returns: * proper academic figures (had a good laugh at the GPT 5 announcement issues) * video game UI / assets * UI design for IDEs * Responsive web design for chat-based interfaces

All of these feel like "pelican" tasks -- they enter into a valley which can't be effectively communicated via textual feedback yet ...

Just reflecting on my own comment -- what one might want is an automated layout system with a simple "natural language"-like API (perhaps similar to Penrose, although it's been awhile since I looked at that project).

Hardened and long use systems like TikZ of course, do have something like this -- but in complex TikZ graphics, you end up with a mixture of "right of" and "left of" (etc) and low-level manual specification, which I think tends to fall into the zone of issues.

> "ai is pretty good at design" its really cool thats its functional but am I going crazy or does all this stuff look really bad?

I agree that it's bad. What I noticed using AI was that it tends to introduce gradients whenever you want to make something look nice. Whenever I see a gradient now I immediately assume that it was designed with AI

Compared to what it’d look like if I’d styled it myself, it’s great lol

Bro did nothing but bland mid web apps. Sometimes I think all this hype around vibe coding is simply because 95% of people who use it that way, they don't ever colour outside the lines.

I've been leaning hard on the code-gen crutch, don't get me wrong, and it's a force multiplier some of the time. I'm not even doing anything that out there, but it keeps stumbling over its shoelaces all the time.

It's really bad if you value design as a primary part of your business language. If not then it's fine.

For example, AI could produce Graphanas design standards, which is fine for the audience.

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