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Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

The before and after images in “prompting for frontend aesthetics” are hilarious. Did no one look at these to make sure the skill actually improved the design?

https://platform.claude.com/cookbook/coding-prompting-for-fr...

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Thank you for pointing this out. All of the examples shown are regressions imo.

Fascinating! Makes me wonder if they were chosen to maximize the contrast between the before and after shots, just to "prove that it "works"".

Personally I prefer the before shots all the way down.

You weren't kidding. That's embarrassing.

"Use a black background and this hideously wide font!"

You should read their frontend design skill [1], which lots of guides recommend blindly, in classic LLM cargo-cult fashion. It doesn't say what people think it does.

[1]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

it’s crazy to see right there in writing the prompt go out of its way to avoid the bootstrap effect with homogeneous templated results and then proceeds to produce fully homogeneous obviously templated AI results.

Well, relatively little of the prompt actually addresses visual design, and the parts that do seem to evoke Claude's worst impulses toward cliches rather than discouraging them. It is pretty crazy.

The "with aesthetics" sites look like early 2000s keygens. Just need some techno music now

Ok, if there was chiptune music I think I _would_ like the after shots better.

To be fair. That was peak aesthetics.

If the only artifacts remaining on earth a million years past our demise were The Parthenon and 2002 keygens, our existence will have been worth it.

Is the before/after backwards?

Of course not. It's vibe-slop all the way down.

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