AndreasMoeller

Unless you own stock in Anthropic, this is a good thing right?

Nordcraft 2.0 adds a powerful AI agent to their visual website builder.

Perfect!

At the same time I see experience engineers pretend that everything they have learned about software development is no longer true.

3 years ago the idea of measuring productivity in lines of code would have been ridiculous. After AI, it is the norm.

The most interesting thing for me is that I am sure it does.

I have been coding for 20+ years and I have used AI agents for coding a lot, especially for the last month and a half. I can't say for sure they make me faster.They definitely do for some tasks, but over all? I can solve some tasks really quickly, but at the same time my understanding of the code is not as good as it was before. I am much less confident that is is correct.

LLMs clearly make junior and mid level engineers faster, but it is much harder to say for Senior.

I am definitely getting the green.

So close, yet so far!

So close, yet so far.

Join the Nordcraft christmas animation challenge and win a copy of Josh Comeaus new course: Whimsical animations

Even though technically the site leaves clear instructions

Much too powerful!

I think it will be more of a class based system TBH.

Exactly, I would be suspicious of anyone who can remember the syntax .

Timing functions is the most extreme example IMO. Being able to visualize a Bezier curve from cubic-bezier(0.47, -0.02, 0.57, 1.04), and THEN mentally map that to an animation behavior is just not humanly possible :)

Something has to be done!

Modern CSS is amazing. It empowers us to build incredible experiences on the web, but as CSS becomes more powerful, we are beginning to see a new weak point.

My co-founder wanted a hand drawn feel on some SVG avatars he was creating.

But using Figmas dynamic stroke feature produced 2MB SVG files.

Time for FETURBULENCE!

We have al created bad user experiences by accident but to create a truly cursed experience you need skillz.

Go head to head with the best of the best to create the worst of the worst?

the editor is currently closely coupled to our hosting platform which is built on top of cloudflare. we want the open source version to be independant of that

All I can say is that your experience from that time was very different from mine.

I don't really understand why you first claim that designers absolutely were not writing CSS and then go onto admitting that they even wrote articles about why everyone should.

That is a very clear contradiction. Clearly a lot of designers were writing CSS otherwise they wouldn't write about it...

What so what are you trying to say?

First you say that you have never herd of designers working with HTML and CSS and then you say that prominent online publications were advertising it?

It didn't feel like it was the most important information for the website, but maybe it should be

It is on our LinkedIn profile

Thanks!

It is a very different tool than Figma. In Nordcraft designers and developers work together in the same tool.

100% The problem is that Figma is not a web design tool. It is a vector drawing tool. It only covers about 10% of what CSS can do so you are never going to get good web design from a Figma file.

You are right that tools don't solve problems, but they can cause them.

The problem here is that designers are limited by their tools. Figma can only do 10% of what CSS is capable of.

We can try to work around those issues with closer collaboration early on, but the truth is that most of the problems aren't universal. They are constructed

Nordcraft is for building the whole frontend. Instead of trying to fix the handoff, designers and developers work in the same tool.

Absolutely agree. That is why we are working on making the Nordcraft editor open source and we write blog posts like this to hope to get more people to see that we need better tools.

If you are just one tool are not going to have meainingful change.

No quite the opposite. I have been around for a long time :)

It used to be completely normal for companies to have developers who worked in php or ruby on rails and have designers take care of the css.

You are absolutely right that in the early days many UI designers came from graphic design and worked in photoshop. But the fact that they also existed in some companies isn't really relevant.

Yes. Nordcraft is based on HTML and CSS. You can either use the style panel or switch to css view if you prefer.

Thank you for the feedback. You can try Nordcraft without signing up by going to one of our examples: https://nordcraft.com/built-with-nordcraft

Figma is a great tool. We use it all the time for all sorts of things, just not web design.