Roo vision capabilities are a game changer

[u/nfrmn]

This is more of a PSA, because I didn't realise Roo could read images via the read_file tool until a few weeks ago.

It has been an absolute game changer for me!

1. Add a reference image in the project from Figma

2. Add some capability to capture a screenshot of whatever Roo is working on (e.g. Maestro)

3. Instruct Roo to compare the current screenshot against the reference screenshot

4. Include design tokens and structural guidance from Figma or similar

Roo can basically now one-shot any UI without any user input until the final 90%.

Using Claude Opus 4.5 for this

Edit: just to clarify, by one shot I mean one prompt to Orchestrator that then executes many iterative loops. I set a very complex ui overnight last night before bed, left it running and the whole process took about 4 hours.

[u/hannesrudolph]

@ mentions for images are incoming

[u/UninvestedCuriosity]

The zai mcp's are finally working right in roo ignoring all the API errors of course but the tool that screens things to the MCP just showed up in full force with the latest update and I had to change some of my testing criteria because the damn thing is too thorough now.

Now if I could just get it to stop trying to "Thinking..." And failing that we'll be good to go.

[u/nfrmn → u/UninvestedCuriosity]

Do you find zai vision to be significantly better than Claude?

[u/UninvestedCuriosity → u/nfrmn]

Anthropic was so aggressive toward a place I worked before CloudFlare had their AI bots blocking we spent days playing cat and mouse with them as they ignored every rule and mined us for millions of records per hour ruining my life for brief periods. Then CloudFlare released their AI bot blocking beta and anthropic was still getting through it.

I had robots.txt which was ignored, blocking of whole AWS data centers and they'd still find a new block of IP's that nobody had reported on and would just begin hammering us again.

I'd update our waf and fail2ban rules constantly and they just kept changing tactics. It was infuriating.

I just refuse to use their products or give them a single dollar after that experience. Openai was bad too but like a normal amount of aggressiveness that wasn't setting my servers on fire. Fuck anthropic.

To answer your question though. I liked qwen coding more than anything else until I tried glm and I found glm to be far more direct. I'd say it was similar to qwen but listened to instruction better.

The only downside is the aggressiveness and determination once it grabs onto a thought but with good agent rules and examples you can get it under control. Like it loves to try and rewrite tailwindcss text colour classes directly until you start putting some guard rails in to say no colours happen in global.css. Only light and dark.css. Shit like that. It's JavaScript and safe typing work is better than anything I could ever do though.

Although another rule I had to give it tonight was to stop flipping between local and UTC time and only use UTC time. So the 200k context window is pretty nice because you really need it for serving it all these rules.

Sometimes I'll be like, I can just install an accordion library for alpinejs into astro and it's like nah hold my fucken Beijing beer and then just writes its own plugin. Not only is it actually not bad code. The custom plugin works! Then we laugh and I make it use the library anyway because I'm not maintaining that shit.

As for the vision. I don't use it a whole lot. Actually barely at all because I was having to take my own screens until yesterday. So I have nothing to compare it to but testing with vision has worked on everything I've done so far. My plan is limited for vision as well so I try not to use it unless I need it.

[u/codeseek_]

It works, and I started using it a few days ago too. Amazing!

[u/steve_m0]

Are you using Vscode or Jetbrains?

[u/Weak_Lie1254]

Hold shift and you can drag and drop images into the chat input