Ask HN: Im a back end dev, how do you go from designing the UI with AI?

I've made fully functioning and pretty decent looking frontends using just Claude Design and Claude Code without touching a single line of HTML, CSS or JS.

I got a decent design document describing what the app needs to do, including concrete user flows. I've made this with review help from Claude and ChatGPT to catch inconsistencies, or underspecified areas. If porting an old app, use them to reverse-engineer a lot of this from the old code.

I then uploaded that to Claude Design, along with perhaps some screenshots or crude box drawings for reference. Claude Design asks me questions and we iterate a bit.

The I export it to Claude Code and have it implement. I make it add tests using suitable test framework.

I then just iterate. Once the automated tests work I test it manually, describing the issues, eg top banner doesn't stick to the top, some container overflows, or changes I want made, attaching screenshots for reference in some cases.

I ask it to update the automated tests yo catch relevant issues I found, to avoid regression.

At least for fairly straight forward apps I found you come amazingly far without lifting the frontend bonnet.

UI is one thing, but there is also UX, otherwise you may get perfect look, but very inconvinient to the users. If you are using AI, especially Claude - try Claude Design. I found it really usefull for myself, but kind of expensive

The way I do it today is:

1. Find a UI kit ready, shadcn / shadcn-svelte

2. Define my fonts and borders and theme <- My design

3. Implement the business

But in that second step there might be much more to do.

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