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Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.
When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.
@aral How do you deal with design system shenanigans?
I am having a hard time with inconsistent UI elements in my personal portfolio/blog that I am working on, it's annoying me because it is pushing me to either under-engineered mess of a code or over-engineered compartmentalization by referring similar codes from already-existing UI libraries.
Yesterday, I just started with some simple atoms (typography), but it feels like there is a lot of work.
@RecurringBloatware @aral
Did you vibe code it?
@Mik3y @aral Yes, I did. Not the best experience, because the LLM makes assumptions about my skillset. It didn't tell me anything about design system methodolody - I had to research about Atomic Design Methodology myself - which is also used by Penpot - the tool that I am currently using.
I am struggling because, for example, ChakraUI, has heading components. Now, do I make own heading components? How do I decide on variants? This is what is making it so hard for me.
@RecurringBloatware @aral try seeing what you can do without ai. You probably are better than ai. You need to understand the code you work on and when ai does, the work you lose understanding.
@Mik3y @RecurringBloatware Yeah, I’d say invest time in learning the fundamentals. Then you can use them time and time again and regardless of which higher-level abstractions (frameworks, etc.) you end up adopting, should you choose to do so.