Speaking as someone who just vibe coded a client for lemmy, no matter how customizable you make your UI it will not be as customizable as having an LLM edit the code directly. The UI I wanted was completely different then the scroll based UI that most current lemmy clients have so the only way to make it was through vibe coding. You can check it out at stakswipe.com and you’ll see there was no way to customize a standard scroll based interface to have the same swiping behavior.
Also customizable UIs tend to be very menu heavy, so yeah you may be able to move the like button to the top right of the post, but to do so you’ll have to navigate through three layers of menus and settings to get there. Whereas with AI you can just type " move the like button to the top right". Customizing using natural language you know is a way better experience then figuring out a bunch of configuration and templating software that’s different for each app.
Speaking as someone who just vibe coded a client for lemmy, no matter how customizable you make your UI it will not be as customizable as having an LLM edit the code directly. The UI I wanted was completely different then the scroll based UI that most current lemmy clients have so the only way to make it was through vibe coding. You can check it out at stakswipe.com and you’ll see there was no way to customize a standard scroll based interface to have the same swiping behavior.
Also customizable UIs tend to be very menu heavy, so yeah you may be able to move the like button to the top right of the post, but to do so you’ll have to navigate through three layers of menus and settings to get there. Whereas with AI you can just type " move the like button to the top right". Customizing using natural language you know is a way better experience then figuring out a bunch of configuration and templating software that’s different for each app.
That’s a fair point.
Still, I think for the median user interested in customisation, a fully vibe coded front end may be overkill.