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Comment by lifeisloving | Hacker News Reader

Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come. It is art, I dont care what people say, and as we all know machines mostly suck at creating art. Anthropic claims to have started training in "taste", but im sure they've realized that cannot be distilled into vector embeddings. Taste is somewhat empheral and is dictated by society and culture that machines can't experience.

In fact, I think it will have more staying power than most, if not all of web dev domains of expertise.

Theres simply no "soul" behind llm crafted websites. There are companies out there, like lovable et al who sell the idea that web design is solved but are still hiring six figure retainer design firms to do their frontend.

I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten.

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I see your point and I agree that ultimately web design will be incredibly hard to automate, probably harder than almost any other programming domain, where people will likely stay for accountability reasons.

But the thing is that for the vast majority of web pages/applications, it barely matters what does the design look like, especially for B2B/internal apps. All the dashboards, CRMs, tracking tools, etc -- these exist mostly for functional requirements, so the design just needs to be inoffensive.

B2C market might hold longer, but ultimately there might emerge some sort of higher-level design specification language which would sidestep the original problem or being too recognizable.

This is like saying the design of your mobile operating system barely matters as all you use it for is to open Youtube and a browser. Design is everything when building a product people interact with.

The thing is, there's no end to the appetite to lower quality in order to reduce personal cost. Whether there's a website or not is very "seen". Whether it's any good at evoking intended understandings or organizing information is not (directly) seen. Unfortunately, only a very small portion of humanity directly cares about design.

I shared your sentiment maybe a year+ ago when it comes to css, and I do think it's one of the areas AI in general struggles with (where art and code meet), but it's a lot better today with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models as someone that works on design systems for a living (for now). It follows stylistic patterns, it can inspect the issue in the browser and have a better understanding of CSS upstream effects than it used to (it used to suck at this and paint itself into a corner over and over like some game of whack-a-mole), and can even tackle things using latest interop features.

It does make really silly mistakes now and then, like using fallback css variables in the wrong order, but they are fewer and farther in between.

"I believe the best web platforms will heavily invest in human crafted UI/UX because that is what will make you stand out. The rest will get thrown on the slop pile and forgotten."

Agreed!

AI model taste is not good, but taste is easy and many cheap human have soul, only hard part is memorize CSS trivia, I predict cost of UI/UX go down and CSS education business also go down

>Llms are not good at web design or writing css, this art form will live on for a long time to come.

I don't want to ruin your day, but LLMs excel at CSS, thanks to the abundance of explainer articles like those on css–tricks.com. Had a bug fixed in about 10s the other week after having stared at it myself for like 10min.

You can just make a mockup in whatever tool you want, and pour your 'art' and 'soul' into that.

Then hand it to the LLM and it'll make CSS to match.

Spoken like someone who's never actually put their art and soul into a mockup and asked an LLM to make CSS to match.

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