Agreed. It's not that the designs it produces are bad necessarily, they're just very same-y. People often talk about the bootstrap era, but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole).
The comparison is pretty accurate though. The moment anyone dared to stray from the bootstrap defaults is when the whole thing would go to shit.
Every steaming pile said less about the development effort and so much more about the project management. This same boneheaded top-down approach is why AI isn't working for anyone without being willing to pour as much effort into babysitting as just writing the damn code yourself.
Old adages continue to ring true and as loud as ever. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
> but that wasn't as bad because bootstrap wasn't so strongly associated with low-effort slop projects (low-effort on the frontend maybe, but not the project as a whole)
They were, at least for that era. Just maybe not at AI-scale.
Like you had to know a little HTML in the bootstrap era. I made what I thought was a pretty nifty landing page but I got endless complaints because “it looked like bootstrap”
> Remember: Claude is capable of extraordinary creative work. Don't hold back, show what can truly be created when thinking outside the box and committing fully to a distinctive vision.
I keep getting Claude telling me to "use the frontend-design skill!", and this is it?
> NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), predictable layouts and component patterns, and cookie-cutter design that lacks context-specific character.
I think it's very clear what it's supposed to do from that text. Just read it at face value.
Whether it does anything useful or not is another matter. I don't think Anthropic or anyone else is doing evals on these skills, and for something subjective like design that would be especially hard anyway.
In other words, does this skill actually change the designs you get out in a positive way, consistently? Who knows? But it's certainly good marketing for Anthropic that whenever agentic web design gets brought up, someone will definitely mention this skill and confidently claim that they get better results by using it, without anything except social proof to back that up.
For years I would use free fonts and spend hours picking them out and getting depressed because they all had something wrong with them…. You get what you pay for.
For a recent project I really liked a font which was in the Adobe Fonts collection and when I had to set stuff in that font with Pillow I gladly bought the font from the foundry because it looks great and saves hours of searching for a “free” font, that is “free” as in puppy.
I've been wondering for a while if ignoring most of that bubble and whatever it cooks up might be a wrong move on my part.
Glad to see that it's just noise.
I suppose the biggest effects these skills have is to prime the user to expect something positive.
Actually kinda like what we do with LLMs. Just put a word in their context window and they suddenly start behaving different because probabilities changed.
Everyone should read through the (very short) skill file. Are we supposed to be this naive or dimwitted? LLM marketing is a transparent swindle at this point.
Found it on reddit after Claude produced the lamest looking generic forms for all the pages on a project I had it build. This did a pass over it and basically fixed it all one shot.
>Blur your eyes or step back
>Can you still perceive hierarchy?
>Is anything jumping out at you?
Telling an eyeless clanker to "blur your eyes" is just so ridiculous. "Is anything jumping out at you?" That's quite a thing for a machine to reason about, and reads like a waste of tokens. I'm not sure who is writing these things, but they seem rather clueless.
Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user interfaces.
I'm pretty sure I'd have better luck just telling the LLM explicitly what I want, because experience in UI/UX is still better than what an LLM would slop out on its own.
Seems ironic to say about this, but it's not: Don't anthropomorphize LLMs; they are just really really good story telling machines.
Telling it to "blur your eyes" doesn't mean it has eyes to blur. It means that it is telling a story that involves itself (a front end engineer) looking at a website and blurring his eyes. What it will continue to complete this with is the tokens with the highest probability of following such a statement. That is to say, it understands what it means to "blur your eyes".
I'd also add that it can take screenshots with headless browsers, and it can blur them with image manipulation tools, and finally it can examine those with its multimodal capabilities.
>Does it work? Maybe. I'm just really skeptical after reading through that repo that any of this leads to actually better user interfaces.
Anecdotally? Yes.
>I'm pretty sure I'd have better luck just telling the LLM explicitly what I want, because experience in UI/UX is still better than what an LLM would slop out on its own.
If you are competent enough to do professional level UI/UX design spec, then yes, this is not for you. You'd be better off using tailored tooling at that point. This is for people who haven't spent years generating UX spec documentation.
If you don't generate exact specs, these LLMs will, in my experience, generate stuff that looks like generic forms that people made with PHP tutorials in 2005.
Try this if you have access to Claude Design, go to sites you like, grab the html/css and a few screenshot and ask it to build a project, it makes an almost 1:1 reproduction. place those files into ur frontend project