Almost all ways to sync Obsidian has a problem with multiple people editing the same file.
Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".
But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.
Not defending some of the not that amazing Obsidian courses or similar out there, but it sounds like you already have a lot of pre-existing knowledge and an approach that works for you, so as I said in the post, keep using that!
You know about markdown syntax, about #tags, about [[linking]], but a lot of people who first hear of Obsidian don't.
Part of what inspired my post was to help people who don't need the extra complexity of a bottom-up note system, Zettelkasten, ever-green notes, atomic notes or other areas of Obsidian, but also to give direction to someone wants to explore these.
For example I'm very happy with my bottom-up approach for knowledge notes, I have been using it for multiple years now and I can still find the things I need, and it doesn't feel messy or anything.
Apologies, I didn't mean my post as an attack on your post, which was well thought out and reasonable. My post was meant as a general obsidian-related rambling in a general obsidian-related thread
I have been having a similar need for some sheets data in Obsidian, I was gonna look into writing a plugin to represent a JSON file as a Obsidian Base, but didn't get to that yet.
Have you tried some of the plugins that allow you to open CSV / TSV files within Obsidian?
I would also love better Git support, especially syncing content from my Android phone to a GitHub repository, so faar it never worked well, I tried a few solutions here but wasn't satisfied with any of them.
You are right. My memory failed me there. I should have done a quick lookup for the pricing.
It's $120/year/account for multi-user setup, and $60/year/account for single-user.
Which is still dirt cheap if you use social media professionally. E.g. what would $360 buy you if you try to do self-hosting? Maybe a day of work from a devops engineer to get this deployed for you?
I think the same way, I'd love a social media management tool, all of the ones I found were insanely expensive or not usable / had horrible usability issues. Pitching a product by telling me it's built quickly with AI does the opposite of convincing me to try it, even though I'm in the market for the solution offered.
I mean, yes look at the vibe coded sites people made after the second Claude Code leak! They are horrible, there are so many issues with them. Look at the existing comments some people with front-end / design knowledge made there.
Just because bad website existed before AI does not mean we should be happy to pump out more bad websites with AI.
However, it is obvious that if it were humans, even several hours would clearly not be enough time to create not only a visually stunning website but even a basic one, such as the pure text site introducing Lua itself (https://www.lua.org/manual/5.5/) (which achieves such visual presentation by uniformly using a set of templates designed by Lua itself)—that's very difficult, isn't it?
Given the author one or two days, I believe most those detail issues mentioned in the comments could be fixed. Most problems stem from the "rush to release a half-finished product within a few hours to gain traffic" approach. Of course, such impatience is a common issue in many VibeCoding projects, like OpenClaw, but this is not a problem with AI's capability to write front-end code.
I mean, there's a fundamental missing understanding of how to build a coherent design, then there's also the problem of just poor implementation such as the animations.
The Lua site has some problems as well, like an uncessary border, text size and spacing, even when it's this minimal. You can get much faster and better results from using or taking inspiration from something like Astro Starlight or UnoCSS
Yes, that is what I mean: most front-end work does not require exceptional creativity or especially polished visual effects. Many people comment that AI-generated pages are extremely mediocre, but that “mediocre” result is already quite good in practice. In the software-related examples I mentioned, whether it is Debian, FreeBSD, SQLite, or Lua—and even Python’s official site, which I would already consider one of the better examples in this category—the visual quality clearly does not reach the same level as the supposedly “mediocre” output generated by AI.
These are already some of the best projects in the world. At least their front-end interfaces still show traces of a coherent design language. As for what the broader landscape looks like, I do not think that needs much explanation. This is not really a matter of capability. It is simply that, before AI, people were generally unwilling to spend more effort on these pages. For people in the pre-AI era, this was already good enough.
Of course, websites for front-end-related tools tend to look better. Besides the two examples you mentioned, sites like Vue and Bun also look quite good. Even so, I do not think they necessarily have any significant visual advantage over what Claude generates.
Let’s return to the title: “Why AI Sucks at Front End?” Does Claude produce genuinely awful page designs? If so, then are not all the examples above—and many, many more—also quite awful by the same standard? That alone is enough to challenge the premise of the question. To criticize AI-generated pages for “lacking innovative design” and being “too mediocre” is really an overly rarefied standard. It forgets what most of the world’s front-end actually looks like, does it not?
Suddenly remembered, isn't Hacknews itself the best counterexample of frontend design? Deliberately minimal styling to ensure content focus, lol :P
I believe generating https://news.ycombinator.com with Claude should be a piece of cake.
Please share what you created! I think people have very different views for what is a good interface, or a tolerable one. I think as a front-end developer and designer I notice a lot of problems most people don't care about.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but no, you did not design a website just fine with AI. It’s not even just “good”. It’s average. Painfully average, to the point of it being easily mistaken for a scam.
I completely disagree. Making a average website is the goal of most businesses that are selling an actual product. His website looks modern and welcoming and does not distract or take away from the actual content. This exactly what most people should aim for. Some actual constructive criticism is some o the icons in the example log mood look weird on my phone, with really small emojis overlapping the face emoji
No one should aim for average, that’s an incredibly defeatist way of looking at it. Besides, design matters. I know HN is frequented mostly by people with very little interest in such topics, but design absolutely matters.
And yes, while the author’s website is perfectly passable, it is by no means “good”. People pick up on that, they might not know they do, but they do. Design wouldn’t be an industry and a school by itself if it didn’t matter and just the average were good enough.
A lot of people don't make websites for a living. If they are a small business and have other things to worry about in terms of actual work, being able to prompt for a clean, professional website frees up their time and means they don't have to use additional funds to hire a developer.
When I shared this I wasn't thinking about the marketing site -- I meant to show the product itself. Given the feedback here I no longer think it's a good representative as-is, especially with the generic SVGs / rounded cards
I can't help but think you and the other commenters reducing this to slop didn't even try the product. I thought it went without saying that I wasn't posting to show a marketing landing page.
Well it works but it also looks like every other generic bootstrap based website with not even an original palette choice.
Great for a project like this, unusable for any client work
Is this a critique of the marketing page or of the product itself?
I didn't intend for this to be about the marketing page -- what you say is true of just about every marketing page. They're prevalent because they are good at distilling information without overwhelming the user. But I agree I can do better and will work on this more, I really appreciate getting this feedback
Most people look at pool chemistry/maintenance as painfully overwhelming, so for everyone to say this looks boring or mundane is a bit validating. No one has (yet!) said they don't understand the product, it's purpose, or it's value :)
The palette looks a lot like the basic colors from Bootstrap is more the thing. Which is what models tend to do a lot of the time, because you know, that's what's been learned.
Also:
- why shadows somewhere and not for other cards?
- why so many different font sizes with no hyerarchy?
- the paddings and margins are inconsistent and don't convey visual rythm. Sometimes there's too much space and sometimes they are too cramped.
ecc...
Is this an ok amateur website you couldn't have made this quick? Yes.
Is that a sufficient value proposition to say that Ai has solved frontend? no.
On a side note: Would you pay the actual real price of these models to achieve this same results, if they weren't subsidized by delusional billionaires? Up to you to respond.
Though it's somewhat clear from the use of tiles with the icon colours and the choice of border colours and all, I quite like it. I would have expected the colour theme from the navbar to be repeated because that's a more non standard palette. I would do that, maybe use a different tile layout (use a tile shape resembling a pool tile? Or even a rectangle signifying a typical pool shape) and create some vector icons for them using the navbar colour scheme.
Some more serious critique of things I noticed within 30 seconds:
- Text isn't selectable on the page.
- The tooltip in the "day 1" to "day 14" cards gets cut off by the border (I see this mistake ALL the time with AI-generated frontends btw)
- It's sparse and very long. I think the information could be condensed in half the size, and it would improve the presentation. This is personal preference though.
- The playbooks' "mark complete" are not persisted on reload or navigation.
All in all, it's functional and quite decent. I agree with the other people saying it looks generic, but I disagree on it being necessarily a bad thing for this kind of product.
I know nothing about pools so I can't comment on the accuracy of the playbooks. It's nice that there's so many of them, but given the LLM vibe of the text I'm slightly suspicious.
I see that you haven't finished the Automatic Sensor Automation. If you need help with that, contact me, I have experience with embedded product development and I like working on interesting projects :)
Why don’t these llm’s just allow you to pick from a set of standardised templates and then allow you to customise it from there in terms of both functionality and design?
What you have got as output is what I also get as output from llm’s - they suck the soul out of everything. Which is fine in the right context but that shouldn’t we as a species strive for in design imo.
Sorry but this website screams AI slop to me. Very sparse, lots of cards and random icons and rounded corners, looks like a few messages in to a Claude code session
I intended to share the product rather than the marketing page. I mean, I didn't intend to share this at all yet because it's not done, but when I saw people asking for examples..
But yeah, marketing site looks like a marketing site. I'm realizing now that a lot of my app's internal design/flair is missing from the marketing page -- so I appreciate your looking/commenting
Hey, one thing I made with this technique is hartwork.life a simple Wordpress store for a friend. I used open ai to design it for me, and then used the techniques above to get Claude code to implement the proper designs.
I am still trying to learn how to wrangle Claude properly, but I have this Claude.md[1] for that I used to make the website. In particular one of the last rules about using imageMagick for comparison.
I haven’t touched this website in a bit (waiting on client) so now I use playwright mcp for the screenshots and the browser interactions.
I started with a boilerplate but AI has been huge at letting me get what I want in terms of frontend building when I was never talented at design or css.
I built https://bridge.ritza.co (demo@example.com username and password if you don't want to sign up) as a trello/linear replacement without looking at a single line of code and it's both good enough for me and doesn't have the obvious AI frontend 'look' as it was copying from the starter.
Highlighted text "no per-seat pricing" is unreadable in dark mode on the home page (dark blue on black). It's surprising for me to see someone use this as an example of decent design because I'm somewhat sure this front page text coloring was never seen/reviewed by a human.
Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".
But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.
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