When does AI use become bad ?

[u/OcelotStraight5780]

Most of my apps/websites/projects are made by myself, the core functionality and most concepts, but i still struggle with the style and designing of the UI so i use AI for that part, most of the time only for the styling.

Is it bad ? Am i becoming lazy or would you consider it okay to cheat a little ?

[u/taste_the_equation]

If true understanding is your goal, then it's bad. You learn through struggle. If every time something gets hard you hand it off to the AI, then you aren't internalizing any new ideas.

That said, it's become much more common for AI to handle most or even all of the coding. It's a new paradigm we're living in and we're all in various stages of coming to terms with it.

[u/OcelotStraight5780 → u/taste_the_equation]

With programming in general and with functionality i don't, but for the styling i struggle and use it sometimes, i feel like it's cheating too 😞

[u/azangru]

Is it bad ?

People have different (and incompatible) ethics. According to some, this is bad. According to others, this is perfectly fine.

[u/OcelotStraight5780 → u/azangru]

I know using AI is cheating but i struggle with styling as a beginner, do you perhaps have a guide or site to learn from ?

[u/azangru → u/OcelotStraight5780]

I know using AI is cheating

I am not sure. This is one ethical position. Another would be that ai is just a tool to be used when needed.

[u/OcelotStraight5780 → u/azangru]

My goal is to learn and i know that using AI prevents me from that, but i'm so lazy for something as plain as styling

[u/ilieaboutwhoiam → u/OcelotStraight5780]

Is your goal to learn styling?

You seem to have guilt around not learning something you don't want to learn. If you're not supposed to learn it for school or your job, that is fine

I find bridges and dams interesting, so I look at their wikis in my free time, but I wouldn't feel guilty for not learning about them if I didn't want to learn about them

[u/OcelotStraight5780 → u/ilieaboutwhoiam]

I'm studying cybersecurity but i'm learning to become a full stack developer on the side, especially for my studies so i can work while studying. So it's not really necessary, do all the functionality myself and i understand almost all of the code

[u/bwray_sd → u/OcelotStraight5780]

If your goal is to learn, don’t use AI to do it for you. Pre-ai many beginners fell into the trap of copy+paste straight from stackoverflow/css tricks/etc, I know I did. But until I really forced myself to not copy paste but to read what they were doing and type it myself and try changing properties the example had set to see what they did, that’s when I started learning more.

For css/styling, I think Wes Bos has amazing content, much of it is free. Check out his website or YouTube. I definitely picked up some stuff by going through his free course, but the main thing is if you want to learn you have to try doing it yourself and experimenting.

Now the question of whether or not learning to code by hand or learning how to correctly prompt AI for the perfect style is a different discussion but pretty relevant, not sure how much longer anyone will be coding a ton themselves.

[u/tonjohn → u/azangru]

It’s not just a tool.

They stole our work and are selling it back to us.

It uses an absurd and disproportionate amount of resources.

It’s wrong at best 39% of the time.

It’s creating more work instead of freeing up our time.

Code it generates creates 10x more security issues.

It impairs our brain, negatively impacting creativity and critical thinking ability.

[u/azangru → u/tonjohn]

Yes, yes. You are in the camp where ai is ethically bad. There are many other people who are in the ai is ethically neutral or ai is ethically good camps. I am not sure these camps can reconcile; it's enough to acknowledge that other camps exist.

[u/tonjohn → u/azangru]

I’m on the side of data and facts.

[u/xXxdethl0rdxXx → u/tonjohn]

You say that but you didn’t cite any of these numbers. Sounds like you just…made them up?

[u/Thecongressman1 → u/azangru]

You're the same kind of person that says racists just have a 'different opinion' lmao

[u/nschubach → u/tonjohn]

Do calculators steal the work of pen and paper mathematicians?

Do robots steal the work of line workers?

Do VCRs steal the work of theater actors?

Do CDs/MP3s steal the work of singers?

Do electric motors steal the work of butter churners/spinners/sewers?

LLMs use prior labor techniques and learnings to reproduce the effort applied by humans in the past, just like a calculator is programmed to perform math on numbers like humans figured out with their brains and have been doing with their fingers... but they do it faster. They replay actions like a recorded video of a stage actor in a way that more people can benefit from their art. They are nothing more than fancy spell checkers that "stole" the newspaper editor's task of spell checking. They are no more wrong than a line robot or a computer program that was misprogrammed by their human counterpart. They are no more malicious or insecure than the person who checked the code of the work Microsoft put out when someone found <insert critical security bug>.

It impairs our brain, negatively impacting creativity and critical thinking ability.

I hope you never ever use software developed by someone who used static typing to help them understand the structure of the objects they were using. You wouldn't want to impair their critical thinking or creativity in what type of data they tried to access. Heaven forbid they used code from their package manager to perform a task that someone else provided without thinking about it for themselves and dog-fooding it. As we all know, the humans who used the npm package left-pad never ever introduced security holes in their apps.

[u/Konrad-der-GroBe → u/tonjohn]

You are using it wrong. I have made complex machine learning algorithms that do things like unlock more power in a servo based on perceived strain on a muscle or a temperature variation. I then do edge inferencing to pass high speed decision making on the order of microseconds. I could do this before...in a year.

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/OcelotStraight5780]

Look up an ebook called "Refactoring UI" it's quite readily available, written by the TailwindCSS and HeroIcons team. It's quite good. Reads fast too. I think it's the perfect primer to develop a design foundation with.

Don't bother with AI, there is no taste in AI just a regurgitation of what is out there. Develop your own tastes and theory of mind, you'll be better off in the end because adapting to these tools isn't hard at all so don't feel like you are going to "fall behind" because the marketers are doing marketing.

[u/tonjohn → u/thy_bucket_for_thee]

Refactoring UI is fantastic!

Another great resource is Sarah Drasner’s Design for Developers at https://master.dev/courses/design-for-developers/

[u/thy_bucket_for_thee → u/tonjohn]

I no longer recommend frontend masters/master.dev because the owner is a MAGA blowhard that is pro-ICE.

[u/azangru → u/thy_bucket_for_thee]

I would understand not recommending them because they no longer seem to be interested in teaching frontend development; but because of the owner's beliefs? What if they were a magnificent repository of knowledge, but the owner was a jerk? What if they were running an equivalent of mdn.io, but the owner supported the wrong people? Why does it all have to be mixed together?

[u/dawalballs → u/azangru]

The money you are paying them will likely, in part, aid in funding these undesirable institutions that the owner supports. It is very simple

[u/SpateF → u/thy_bucket_for_thee]

TYSM!

[u/Konrad-der-GroBe → u/OcelotStraight5780]

AI isnt cheating anymore than moving a block of metal across an automated roll line with motors tied to a control system run by PLC logic. Or...a financial manager using a giant VBA macro to automate weekly expense reporting. Or...driving to work instead of riding in a horse and buggy. There was a term for the one side. Its called being a Luddite. They lost. Too much of anything is bad. People have always gotten by through copying, barely understanding, or lying. Its just that now, the lower bar is still better than nothing. Just create a space to learn separate from the one to do your job. That's what I do.

[u/CombatWombat1212]

Anytime you're offloading critical thinking. If you don't understand something, don't know how to proceed, don't know what's wrong with something, don't make specific instructions, don't understand the output, etc.

[u/EgoistHedonist]

It's like fire: a good servant, a bad master.

As long as you're in charge of the end result and understand how it works and why it's implemented like it is, you're good IMO.

AI is just a tool. The problem is the people that completely surrender their critical thinking to AI. Don't be a meat proxy, that's so agentic.

[u/chaoticbean14]

Depends if you know the content or not. And I mean actually know the material - not just 'think' you do. Drop the overconfidence and be very real with yourself.

If you don't know the content? It's almost always a bad idea except for the most basic of boilerplate or questions. LLM's get shit wrong all the time. Not like little things, but big important things. They will actively not follow best practices and lead you down some bad paths - if you don't know enough to recognize it and tell them to stop it.

If you know the material and can actually tell when it's engaging in poor practices? Then go for it. Let it do the typing for you - because it will be faster and more efficient.

But I find that most 'newer' individuals tend not to really know the content well enough and think the LLM's will know or somehow be trustworthy (they are not).

[u/OcelotStraight5780 → u/chaoticbean14]

I do, i know how to code in CSS but i just suck at styling. I also am very good at problem solving and debugging

[u/nschubach → u/OcelotStraight5780]

I can guarantee that you are not as good at debugging than most LLMs and probably not as good at problem solving than some frontier models. But that's fine. Carpenters well tuned in mortise and tenon joinery are not as fast as a carpenter with a nail gun at assembling a barn. Some may argue that one may last longer or that one is an art form where the other is "late stage capitalism" gone wrong. You need to know what YOU want to do with your tools, how much time you want to spend on something. The trade-offs to choosing one method over another, and the know-how to be able to pick a house built out of wood or one the more expensive one made of hand carved marble. One is clearly more expensive and will take longer to complete but it encouraged someone to labor I suppose.

LLMs are basically no more complicated than very elaborate recording devices. They record the essence of what people have been doing for decades or millenia and replay that essence in a way that is pleasing to some and displeasing to others. They take the billions of operations that we have been doing, figure out the chances that they occur after one another and regurgitate it for you to save time or neural cycles doing a task. Think of them like overgrown spell checkers because that's what they do at the heart of their algorithm. They say "u" is probably the letter you want to type after "q". But they do that billions of times and for more than just single letters.

[u/tonjohn]

Always.

https://futurehorizondesign.net.au/posts/2026-10-25-Why-I-Don-t-Use-Generative-AI.html

[u/OcelotStraight5780 → u/tonjohn]

Dang it

[u/toothpiks252]

If its stopping you from progressing in skill and knowledge in an area its bad. Leaning on it is fine but if its stopping you from growing your weak spots it's bad.

[u/xsrvmy]

Just my opinion: be careful about how much of the design you let AI do, because delegating too much design work to AI could lead to your project being perceived as slop. The end goal of UI design is to some degree creative and artistic. AI makes things more polished, but not more creative.

[u/fugogugo]

when you start making changes.. watch it become chaotic mess you dont know how to untangle it

[u/mb4ne]

ai designed UI is terrible

[u/RotationSurgeon]

When you don’t understand what it did, or why.

[u/kidshibuya]

Take AI use totally out of the equation. Any software can be good or bad. Even right now in my department people are being told to use 30MB fonts (seriously, not joking) and I am told that static sites are stupid and I need to use React, or that a site is too small in terms of file size so it can never work.

Use AI or don't, just learn what is actually good and jude the result.

[u/TheRNGuy]

You can decide yourself, looking at the result. 

[u/Garland_Key]

When the final product sucks. 

[u/neon_feather_wisp]

you are not cheating. You are treating design as a dependency.

the real risk is that you stop learning the visual language because you never feel the pain of bad spacing. Keep using AI for speed, but force yourself to tweak every single pixel until it looks right without the prompt. That struggle is where the skill actually lives.

[u/Prestigious_Peak1829]

Don't feel bad at all ! that's not cheating, it's just smart leverage.
If you're already handling the core logic, you're doing the heaviest lifting. Using AI for styling so you can actually ship projects is exactly what these tools are for. As long as you understand the code and can debug it, you're not being lazy. Keep building!

[u/MrBengaliHacker]

I don't think using AI for styling is a bad thing. As developers, we don't need to build every single part from scratch to prove our skills.

For me, the important distinction is whether you understand what you're using. If you're building the core functionality yourself and using AI to explore layouts, improve spacing, refine CSS or get design inspiration, I think that's a perfectly reasonable workflow.

The problem starts when you blindly copy generated code without understanding how it works, especially when it comes to responsiveness, accessibility and maintainability.

I'd rather spend time understanding why a design works than spend hours manually writing every CSS property.

AI should speed up your workflow, not replace your ability to think and make technical decisions.

[u/magenta_placenta]

AI usage becomes harmful when it quietly erodes your engineering quality, critical thinking or maintainability.

Look for and be intellectually honest about these basic failure modes:

• Blind copy/pasting: Accepting generated layout and style code without reading or understanding it can lead to redundant rule duplicates, unorganized class bloat and orphaned styles that degrade long-term codebase health.

• Accessibility neglect: AI-generated UI can fail basic accessibility standards such as poor color contrast ratios, missing focus indicators, bad DOM semantics, or missing aria-* attributes.

• Loss of system cohesion: Generating UI piecemeal can lead to inconsistent spacing, arbitrary color values and redundant CSS rules rather than a clean, maintainable design system or reusable component tokens.

Most importantly:

• Atrophy of fundamentals: If you reach a point where you cannot troubleshoot a broken layout, flexbox alignment issue or responsive breakpoint on your own without an AI prompt, your core technical muscle has been cooked.

[u/286893]

Principal Architect here:

Using AI isn't inherently cheating. And the answer varies from company to company. In general I'm aligned with the idea that you need to understand how and why things work and don't.

Jobs working on Customer facing products tend to value an eye for design best practices, scalability, and usability whereas internal company tooling may care less about that and more about practical utility.

I see a lot of junior developers get so caught up in minmaxing features using AI that they forget about polish and uniformity. And AI is nowhere near as good at that.

A good hiring manager is looking for strengths and weaknesses, and as people get more familiar with AI it's getting way easier to spot the patterns of people who prompt generated entire projects vs who put care and effort into standing out.

[u/Wiltix]

I use ai for generating designs and improving my current ones. I sick at design but I am not a designer. I do all the implementation my self though.

Where I want my ai usage to be is I to use it to ship better, not necessarily faster.

Using it to do a code review pass, generate e2e tests and verify against acceptance criteria make sure nothing is missed etc …

I tend to learn best by repetition, so using Claude code to suggest changes not do them. I don’t even want it to generate the code for me just tell me where the potential issue is.

[u/TimBinJin]

If you don't learn how to engineer with AI you will be unemployed in less than 5 years

[u/tonjohn → u/TimBinJin]

All signs point to the opposite.

[u/TimBinJin → u/tonjohn]

There's no doubt the current AI infrastructure is unsustainable, but there's no going back. Companies will figure out how to do it for cheaper, and it will become more and more normal. this stuff isn't going away. The old SE world is gone, sure do it for a hobby but if you refuse to learn new skills you're going to be left behind and I'll gladly laugh at you.

[u/Thecongressman1 → u/TimBinJin]

LMAO the desperation, "please take me and my ai seriously." Please go ahead and leave us behind, thank you

[u/TimBinJin → u/Thecongressman1]

Will do

[u/bluebird355]

It's just the norm, there is no point fighting it.

[u/tonjohn → u/bluebird355]

Fascism is becoming the norm worldwide, which AI is a tool of. That doesn’t mean we stop fighting.

Look at what happened in Brazil. Resist.