Ask HN: LLM struggles to center div too?

5 points by divan 10mo ago ↗ HN

I used AI coding agents for the past half a year a lot with Flutter. Recently I had to work on the tailwind web project, and I was surprised how often it gets layout/UI wrong. Even with puppeteer attached, haveing access to raw HTML output and screenshots, it's still struggles to do simple alignment, centering things.

In a way, it mirrors famouse "centering div in css" challenge, but I wonder if it's the same experience for other people who work with web stack more often.

4 comments

[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] thread

alexander2002 10mo ago ↗

AI is really bad at fe.

[deleted] 10mo ago ↗

(comment deleted)

geophph 10mo ago ↗

Yes I’ve grumpily wasted far too much time on debugging reasonably basic layout things with AI and getting nowhere.

sky2224 10mo ago ↗

Been using Claude Sonnet 4 for a web app that's using React, Mantine, Vite, and a NoSql db.

Frankly, it's been incredible. The app is not complicated by any means. It's a really simple CRUD app for tracking animals (what farm animals are on, breeds, medical history, birthing schedule, etc.), but when I've provided mockups, it's done a surprisingly good job to at least get me 80%-90% of the way there.

I think it has to do with my tech stack honestly. Well built components can get an individual developer with poor FE experience quite far. I think it's the same for AI as well at this point.