I guess they do "see" but more like "see an explanation of the image", not "see" as in experience visually. They're really bad at details and perfection when it comes to images, and doesn't understand things like visual hierarchy, affordances and other fundamental design concepts. Most of them are able to describe those things with letters, but doesn't seem to actually fundamentally grasp it when asking it to do UIs even when mentioning these things.

Try doing 100% vibe-coding with an agent and loosely specify what kind of application you want, and observe how the resulting UI and UX is a complete mess, unless you specify exactly how the UI and UX should work in practice.

If they actually had spatial understanding, together with being able to visually experience images, then they'd probably be able to build proper UI/UX from the get go, but since they only could describe what those things are, you end up with the messes even the current SOTAs produce.

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stingraycharles 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I guess they do "see" but more like "see an explanation of the image", not "see" as in experience visually.

Images are tokenized and fed to the exact same model, they can “visually inspect” images, eg “find the 2 differences between two images” and “where’s Waldo”-style things.

So your mental model that they see descriptions is inaccurate.

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spongebobstoes 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the models can accept images directly as tokens. not a description of an image, the actual image itself.

yes, the visual intelligence is limited, but they do actually have vision capabilities.

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marcus_holmes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is my experience too, but with all other aspects of the application. If you only loosely describe it, it comes out as a mess. You have to know what you're building to get the LLM to actually build something decent. I don't think this is purely a visual or design constraint.

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embedding-shape 5 hours ago | parent [-]

When I'm using agents for programming, I can have a AGENTS.md outlining exactly what requirements, guidelines and constraints all the code need to follow, and the agent (codex in my case) will pretty much nail that.

I've tried doing the same for design work, just really outlining exactly how the UI and UX needs to look and work, but for some reason it struggles a whole bunch with it, regardless of how clear I am. Maybe it's I'm just worse at explaining and describing what UI and UX I'm actually after though, I suppose.

	▲	marcus_holmes 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I once worked at a startup where the CEO was originally a designer. He once spent two days huddled with the main designer for the product, trying to pick exactly the right font for the product. I have no idea how you'd have that kind of discussion with an LLM. But then, I would not spend more than five minutes on this decision, so I'm probably the wrong audience for this ;)