Re vibe coding, I agree with your comments but where I've used it is when I needed to mock up a UI or a website. I have no front end experience so making a 80% (probably 20%) but live demo is still a valuable thing, to show to others to get the point across, obviously not to deploy. It's a replacement for drawing a picture of what I think the UI should look like. I feel like this is an under-appreciated use. LLM coding is not remotely ready for real products but it's great for mock-ups that further internal discussions.
Same. As somebody who doesn't really enjoy frontend work at all, they are surprisingly good at being able to spit out something that is relatively visually appealing - even if I'll end up rewriting the vast majority of react spaghetti code in Svelte.
I love front-end work, and I'm really good at it, but I now let the AI do CSS coding for me. It seems to make nice looking buttons and other design choices that are good enough for development. My designer has their own opinions, so they always will change the CSS when they get their hands on it, but at least I'm not wasting my time creating really ugly styles that always get replaced anymore. The rest of the coding is better if I do it, but sometimes the AI surprises me - though most often it gets it completely wrong, and then I'm wasting time letting it try and that just feels counterproductive. It's like a really stupid intern that almost never pays attention to what the goal is.
They're pretty good at following direction. For example you can say:
'Usw React, typescript, materialUi, prefer functions over const, don't use unnecessary semi colons, 4 spaces for tabs, build me a UI that looks like this sketch'
But if I have time I’ll ask for it to be built using best practices from the programming language it’ll be built in as the final product whether that’s svelte, static astro, or even php
I’m not even seeing this react spaghetti code you’re referring to. It’s pretty impressive front ends with what looks like concise, well organized code.
Tried it recently and it seems rather hit or miss. Claude 3.7 was able to generate the right business logic but the UI didn't look right at all and I couldn't fix it with further iterations. I'm no frontend dev at all and didn't know how to fix it properly, but at some point I noticed that it tried to use flexbox even though I asked for a grid. I pasted the thing into Gemini, said "rewrite it using CSS grid" and it came out correct. Maybe Gemini could have one-shotted it, from my limited trials it seems much better than Claude.
I think it would be faster/easier to use a website builder or various templating libraries to build a quick UI rather than having to babysit an LLM with prompts over and over again.
