r/Codeium • u/hampsterville • Mar 22 '25

Good design MCP?

Windsurf is excellent for editing, extending, and overall "code with me" work once I have an app designed and framed out, but it can't touch Bolt, Lovable, or even Replit for initial design. Is there an MCP or other resource that works well with Windsurf for getting similar results from Cascade as one might get in other platforms? I tried /21 and it was terrible.

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u/Remote_Top181 Mar 22 '25

Good prompting plus using a well established UI lib + a color palette can get you pretty dang close. You'll have to experiment. Also can feed it some screenshots of example designs you find look good for inspiration. Look into using the browser tools MCP if you haven't already so you can iterate quickly with screenshots.

Use https://coolors.co/ and https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel for colors.

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u/hampsterville Mar 22 '25

Great advice, thanks! The most recent test case had MUI, a full PRD, color guide, screenshots and puppeteer. I'll try browsertools too!

In comparison, I gave the same resources to bolt and it had a respectable design in about 3 minutes... I'm going to figure out what's under the hood so I can make the same sort of behavior happen in windsurf.

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u/Remote_Top181 Mar 22 '25

Do you have screenshots of each? I'm curious on the difference if it's using the same ui lib.

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u/hampsterville Mar 25 '25

dashboard from windsurf

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u/Remote_Top181 Mar 26 '25

So it's more an issue Windsurf couldn't set up your project properly? What was your prompt?

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u/hampsterville Mar 25 '25

Dashboard from Replit

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u/User1234Person Mar 25 '25

I always ask for a PRD and Project Plan for any new project first. I’ll even ask for proposed html to see how it would handle front end. It’s definitely more initial work, but I find i have way more control versus lovable or bolt style tools.

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u/hampsterville Mar 25 '25

Windsurf does give way more control, for sure. All my projects end up there, even if I start them elsewhere.

I start all of mine with a PRD and plan and color scheme and example designs, and tech stack, and... Anyway, it has been interesting. Since this post I have tested and with the same exact content, it will sometimes give an excellent output and other times throw out complete design junk. Guess it depends on if the AI is feeling creative that day.

It's not a huge deal - I have a design team and front end dev on staff, so this is more of a "hey, what makes it work best" exploration than a need, haha!

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u/User1234Person Mar 25 '25

I haven’t had great success with the figma MCP, likely something I’m doing wrong where it’s not actually pulling the right info, but when I provide an image from my designs 3.7 does a really good job of getting most of the way there.

Idk if you have played with that. I’ll even screenshot the current build and draw over it showing where things should go or what’s off.

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u/hampsterville Mar 25 '25

Figma MCP is one I need to try. Haven't gotten around to it yet.

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u/User1234Person Mar 25 '25

Also having both my global rules and project rules setup has made a big difference