I noticed LLMs struggle with time and date APIs, especially involving timezones, and layering instructions, often ignoring detailed guidelines. But they excel at web UI design, remembering CSS details and creating clean, simple layouts. They can add navigation bars and update them automatically, often doing better than some human designers.
Two programming things I have noticed LLMs are bad at (scope includes Claude 3.7, Grok 3, and gpt-4.1) in late April 2025:
* Anything to do with time and date APIs, especially if it involves timezones. I guess that's fair as these desperately confuse humans too.
* Layering instructions. I have a conventions file for my SQLite application that instructs the genie not to inline SQL calls in the business logic, but rather to create new methods for the back-end manager class. It blithely ignores this.
On the other hand, LLMs are better at web UI design that I am. They have a kind of synthetic tastefulness that is doubtless formed by looking at lots of examples, and is surprisingly good - though I'm sure a lot of web designers would consider it bland and austere.
More importantly, they can remember all the fiddly details of CSS, which is more than I can do or even want to. Usually I can just tell them I want to page or page element to look a certain way and they'll do it.
When I told Claude I wanted my application to have a common navigation-bar header, without asking it set things up so that the navbar entry corresponding to the page that you're on is always highlighted. And afterwards, when I created a new endpoint, it just added to the nav bar appropriately without being prompted.
I like that they don't instantly reach for an overcomplicated 17-ton JavaScript library to solve problems. This is more couth than many human web designers can manage.
Two programming things I have noticed LLMs are bad at (scope includes Claude 3.7, Grok 3, and gpt-4.1) in late April 2025:
* Anything to do with time and date APIs, especially if it involves timezones. I guess that's fair as these desperately confuse humans too.
* Layering instructions. I have a conventions file for my SQLite application that instructs the genie not to inline SQL calls in the business logic, but rather to create new methods for the back-end manager class. It blithely ignores this.
On the other hand, LLMs are better at web UI design that I am. They have a kind of synthetic tastefulness that is doubtless formed by looking at lots of examples, and is surprisingly good - though I'm sure a lot of web designers would consider it bland and austere.
More importantly, they can remember all the fiddly details of CSS, which is more than I can do or even want to. Usually I can just tell them I want to page or page element to look a certain way and they'll do it.
When I told Claude I wanted my application to have a common navigation-bar header, without asking it set things up so that the navbar entry corresponding to the page that you're on is always highlighted. And afterwards, when I created a new endpoint, it just added to the nav bar appropriately without being prompted.
I like that they don't instantly reach for an overcomplicated 17-ton JavaScript library to solve problems. This is more couth than many human web designers can manage.
Two programming things I have noticed LLMs are bad at (scope includes Claude 3.7, Grok 3, and gpt-4.1) in late April 2025:
* Anything to do with time and date APIs, especially if it involves timezones. I guess that's fair as these desperately confuse humans too.
* Layering instructions. I have a conventions file for my SQLite application that instructs the genie not to inline SQL calls in the business logic, but rather to create new methods for the back-end manager class. It blithely ignores this.
On the other hand, LLMs are better at web UI design that I am. They have a kind of synthetic tastefulness that is doubtless formed by looking at lots of examples, and is surprisingly good - though I'm sure a lot of web designers would consider it bland and austere.
More importantly, they can remember all the fiddly details of CSS, which is more than I can do or even want to. Usually I can just tell them I want to page or page element to look a certain way and they'll do it.
When I told Claude I wanted my application to have a common navigation-bar header, without asking it set things up so that the navbar entry corresponding to the page that you're on is always highlighted. And afterwards, when I created a new endpoint, it just added to the nav bar appropriately without being prompted.
I like that they don't instantly reach for an overcomplicated 17-ton JavaScript library to solve problems. This is more couth than many human web designers can manage.
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