This week, I focused more on the frontend design of a few webpages for our AI Coder web application. I specifically set out to have ChatGPT create a login page for users to login or create a new account, as well as a user home page that the user will be re-directed to upon a successful login. I focused mostly on the frontend design and aesthetics of these pages, but I also did some backend work.
One thing I noticed this week was that you have to be as specific as possible when asking AI to write code, especially for frontend design. It is difficult to get AI to layout a webpage how you want if you use generic words like “pretty”, “nice”, or even just “organized”. You have to really spell out how you want things to appear on the page, using words like “centered”, “spaced evenly”, “header”, or “footer”. Once I understood how better to phrase my prompts, I could see the design of the webpages improve. This was probably my biggest takeaway for the week: be as specific as possible when writing your prompts to the AI.
The AI also wrote CSS code really well, but I did encounter one small problem: when I asked it to write code to add an HTML table to one page, the code it initially wrote put all data in one column. I had to manually debug this because, as I noted in my post last week, AI is not great at debugging code. It really seems like it can write basic code that does the job about 90% of the time. That 10% can be tricky, because it could be some outdated code or it could be an implementation error.
Another thing I worked on this week was setting up a server instance so that I could connect to our database and display a table on one of our webpages. ChatGPT did extremely well with this request and the code they generated worked perfectly for what I needed (aside from the aforementioned HTML table issue). In the code it generated, it noted where I needed to update the information to my specific database, so it was really easy to understand. I was very impressed by this.
Overall this week, I have learned that AI seems to excel more with backend programming tasks, probably because there are fewer ways to implement those. On the frontend, there are infinite ways to design a webpage, so it will be up to me to improve my AI prompts to continue to refine the UI design.
Next week, I plan to finalize the frontend design of the landing, login, and user home pages. After that, the more challenging part of integrating user authentication with our database will be on the horizon. Looking forward to the challenge!
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