I needed a dashboard that would impress a client, and ChatGPT’s designs weren’t getting me there. I finally opened Claude, a tool I had kept putting off because of its usage limits. About five minutes later, I was looking at a UI block I would normally spend two or three hours styling by hand.
There was a sidebar to improve, tables to restyle, and a calendar that needed attention. I could build those interfaces myself. I had been doing that for years.
Usually, that meant opening page.js, writing Tailwind classes, adjusting the
global CSS, checking the browser, and repeating until the component looked
right.
ChatGPT was already part of my daily work. I used it for backend logic, frontend functionality, and debugging. But for this particular job, I kept looking at the UI and wanting something better.
That was when I decided to try Claude.
I had heard about Claude before. Claude 2.1 had arrived on 21 November 2023, and that was the model I started with.
I remember why I had hesitated: the usage limits.
I had read about people sending a handful of messages and then having to wait hours before continuing. I did not know how those limits would apply to my work. I was already using ChatGPT heavily, and I was reluctant to add another subscription that might interrupt me halfway through a task.
Still, the dashboard needed work.
I searched Google and spent time reading Reddit discussions, as I often do when I want to hear how people are actually using a tool. Claude kept coming up in conversations about UI development.
Eventually, I gave it a try.
I copied my existing component code into Claude and described the changes I wanted. By then, regular use of ChatGPT had taught me to explain the task with more care. I had working code and a specific interface to improve.
The version it returned was close to what I had been trying to achieve.
I was surprised by how much of the styling it had reconsidered. The layout, spacing, typography, and treatment of the components felt like they belonged together. It went much further than changing a few Tailwind classes.
As I continued through the sidebar, tables, and calendar, that impression held.
The styling was jaw-dropping to me.
I knew how long I would normally spend getting those components into shape. Watching a convincing version appear that quickly changed what I thought I could get through in a day.
There was a catch.
During the redesign, Claude removed some of the functional logic. I had to inspect the result, restore what was missing, and make adjustments. The interface looked better before the component was ready to use.
That distinction mattered. I still needed to understand the code well enough to recognise what had disappeared.
Even with that repair work, the result was useful enough that I took the Pro subscription.
My team was impressed by the pace. We could see substantial changes across the dashboard much sooner than my usual process would have allowed.
At the time, I was working on one or two dashboards. Claude began finding a regular place in that work.
For a while, the division was straightforward.
I used ChatGPT Web for the backend and the functional parts of the frontend. Once those were working, I copied the components into Claude and asked it to handle the presentation.
ChatGPT helped me work out what the application should do. Claude helped me get the interface closer to how I wanted it to look.
That workflow made sense to me because it followed what I had observed in my own tasks. I was getting useful results from both tools, in different parts of the same job.
But the division did not stay fixed.
I used Claude 2.1 for two or three months. At the end of March 2024, I moved to Claude 3 Sonnet, which Anthropic had introduced on 4 March as the first Sonnet model.
Sonnet impressed me again. It was particularly good at the UI and React work I was giving it. As I worked with it, I became increasingly comfortable asking it to handle the component from the beginning.
The extra step of generating frontend code in ChatGPT and transferring it to Claude started happening less often.
Eventually, most of my React and Next.js work moved to Claude. ChatGPT remained part of my backend workflow.
I had opened Claude because I was unhappy with a dashboard.
I expected help with Tailwind classes.
A few months later, I was trusting it with the components underneath them.
— H.