"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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mccoyb 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 ...

	▲	mccoyb 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Hrun0 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "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

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jama211 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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btbuildem 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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weego 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.