How our vibe-coded website looks like a designer made it
How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
Yakko Majuri, founder of Railcode, explains how coding agents helped him realize a playful, Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired website. He shares his iterative process: generating multiple design options, building interactive playgrounds for color tweaks, and forking prototypes. The result impressed visitors who assumed a designer was involved, proving that LLMs can be used for tasteful, personal design.
I've actually found myself more excited about design now that I have coding agents to help me. I was helpless before, but now I can actually make a creative vision I have a reality.
- fiatpandas
OP, you accidentally invented the design process that they teach in design school. You can officially call yourself a designer.
1) have a high level functional goal
2) be inspired and think of a motif
3) go wide within that motif and explore
4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate
5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.
- ananmays
A designer did make it! The process you undertook is called design!
- jjcm
It looks like a lot of their early attemps are early gpt outputs or claude design outputs, which have a lot of the same smell. People are discounting how good image->html flows are these days though.
I had gemini describe this webpage as prompts, then fed it into an image -> code pipeline. Note that this is with 0 input from me:
https://html.non.io/railcode-animated
This is with Opus 5.5 building it out on low effort, and yes the spec was already made from the original site, but 0->1 that doesn't result in purple gradients or claude brown is very much possible now.
- quicklywilliam
Best tip in here: when tweaking details like colors and fonts, just ask Claude to make you throwaway picker tools right in the site.
This is totally obvious in retrospect but I never thought of it (probably because of 25 years of thinking about tools in terms of reusable components).
Thanks for writing!
- chmod775
Answer: because a human designed it in an iterative process. LLMs just wrote the code.