With the recent announcement of an AI-UI tool from the folks at Vercel, there's been a lot of discussion about claims around "production-ready code" that is actually riddled with bugs, lacks semantics, and fails to meet even basic accessibility and UX criteria. Heather has written some solid thoughts around how not only is this not as innovative or new as is being touted, but that we're doomed to keep making these mistakes until actual UI experts are involved, and UI requirements like accessibility are baked in from the ground up:
No tool that asserts you can build production-grade UI code from their AI is innovative if it's not driven by accessibility. It's also not production-grade if the code it generates is inaccessible. That is the short and sweet of it.
On the reality of (and best application for) these tools, POCs and design/engineering discussions:
In the end, all we've built is a really high fidelity mockup of what the UI might look like.
