As an newbie on Elements creating his website, a non-coder who has been working for years with Claude, I am the clear target of that feature :-))) I am really looking forward to working with it. I once tried a pure vibe-coding website creation, and I had the problem Dan is mentioning here: I can’t go back to the code and it is painful to ask Claude to correct this, change that, and amend this… But Elements+Claude working together is the best of both worlds.
My guess is the actual “best approach” is going to turn out to be:
- Design the site framework using the Elements components (and best with the Elements Essentials add-on and perhaps other third-party options) to get a basic design.
- Use AI to parse that and make corrections/additions/changes in a vibe coding way.
- Populate the resulting site with your actual content.
- Use AI and manual interaction to tweak.
Asking AI to do all the heavy lifting up front and just completely design a site starts to ignore all the goodness that has already been built into Elements, and I don’t think AI engines will completely keep up with all the possible components that can be added via the Store.
Moreover, AI is pattern matching by nature. That means that if you ask it to design a Web site, it’s going to create a Web site that looks like all the other average Web sites. Your landing page will look like everyone else’s. Not a way to stand out, and the current “average” is what I call a doom-scroll nightmare, particularly on mobile.