> Gemini 2.5 Pro now ranks #1 on the WebDev Arena leaderboard
It'd make sense to rename WebDev Arena to React/Tailwind Arena. Its system prompt requires [1] those technologies and the entire tool breaks when requesting vanilla JS or other frameworks. The second-order implications of models competing on this narrow definition of webdev are rather troublesome.
If llms are able to write better code with more declarative and local programming components and tailwind, then I could imagine a future where a new programming language is created to maximize llm success.
It would also be harder for the LLM to work with. Much like with humans, the model's ability to understand and create code is deeply intertwined and inseparable from its general NLP ability.
Would this be addressed by better documentation of code and APIs as well as examples? All this would go into the training materials and then be the body of knowledge.
shadcn/ui is such a terrible thing for the frontend ecosystem, and it'll get even worse for it as AI gets better.
Instead of learnable, stable, APIs for common components with well established versioning and well defined tokens, we've got people literally copying and pasting components and applying diffs so they can claim they "own them".
Except the vast majority of them don't ever change a line and just end up with a strictly worse version of a normal package (typically out of date or a hodgepodge of "versions" because they don't want to figure out diffs), and the few that do make changes don't have anywhere near the design sense to be using shadcn since there aren't enough tokens to keep the look and feel consistent across components.
The would be 1% who would change it and have their own well thought out design systems don't get a lift from shadcn either vs just starting with Radix directly.
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Amazing spin job though with the "registry" idea too: "it's actually very good for AI that we invented a parallel distribution system for ad-hoc components with no standard except a loose convention around sticking stuff in a folder called ui"
> It'd make sense to rename WebDev Arena to React/Tailwind Arena.
Funnily, training of these models feels getting cut mid of v3/v4 Tailwind release, and Gemini always try to correct my mistakes (… use v3 instead of v4)
Same for some Material UI things in react. This is easily fixed by pasting relevant docs directly into the context, but annoying that you have to do that at all.
This model also seems to do a decent job with Angular. When I was using ChatGPT it was mostly stuck in pre-16 land, and struggled with signals etc, but this model seems to correctly suggest use of the latest features by default.
In most reasonably-sized websites, Tailwind will decrease overall bundle size when compared to other ways of writing CSS. Which is less code, 100 instances of "margin-left: 8px" or 100 instances of "ml-2" (and a single definition for ml-2)? Tailwind will dead-code eliminate all rules you're not using.
In typical production environments tailwind is only around 10kb[1].
You're doing it wrong. Tailwind is endlessly customizable and after compilation is only kilobytes. But yes lets complain because we don't understand the tooling....
It'd make sense to rename WebDev Arena to React/Tailwind Arena. Its system prompt requires [1] those technologies and the entire tool breaks when requesting vanilla JS or other frameworks. The second-order implications of models competing on this narrow definition of webdev are rather troublesome.
[1] https://blog.lmarena.ai/blog/2025/webdev-arena/#:~:text=PROM...