AI vs Visual Design Implementation in Xperience by Kentico Projects

In my experience, AI works extremely well for business logic and backend style tasks.

If you mean "back office" styles, this has been my experience as well. Line-of-business apps are often forms-over-data driven user interfaces - as long as the forms work correctly and are legible, the styles and UX don't need a heavy hand.

Clients often deliver custom visual designs without a design system, and turning those into production ready templates is still largely manual work.

I imagine this will be common for awhile. Are those designs crafted to work well with AI tools or even human front-end developer workflows and best practices? There's still a lot of disconnect between web design and web design implementation.

At Kentico Connection I heard claims that front end or template coding roles are becoming obsolete.

I do believe this is happening, but it requires professionals that are vertically integrated (i.e. in the same team or agency), using the right tools, and understand how the deliverables of one person are used by the next in a workflow.

The Kentico Community Portal has a pretty simple design and still it needs some some TLC. I rely on an existing design system and components that I can quickly reuse and AI agents that quickly create several variants of new designs. I know some of the designs will look bad, but with enough variations to pick from there's always something that is acceptable.

If I was working on new designs... well, I wouldn't be 😅, I'd have a team to back me up and produce the assets, style guides, and components I use.

Linking to my LinkedIn post where we had a pretty good discussion: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7424739503652806656/

How do you and your teams handle design to code today?

For the Kentico projects, still largely manual. We are fortunate to work primarily with in-house designs built on an established design system. While it’s not flawless, having that structure allows us to feed component designs into AI to generate a "decent starting point." However, when a client provides a "free-form" design without a system, the AI struggle you described is very real.

Are you using AI successfully in this phase?

Success is currently tied to intent. If the wireframes and designs were created with a modular, component-based mindset, AI is a great accelerator. However, we find that maintenance and amendments remain manual. Feeding AI-generated code back into the project for changes is not something we've figured out how to do effectively and often creates more problems than it solves.

Has your workflow or tooling changed in the last year?

The biggest shift hasn't been the tools themselves, but the mindset of the roles. Designers are now more aware of how their deliverables (variables, tokens, auto-layouts in Figma) are consumed downstream. This is important in general, but moreso now if we have any hope of leveraging AI. Something as simple as making sure variables are used for border radius in Figma makes a massive difference down the line.

At Kentico Connection I heard claims that front end or template coding roles are becoming obsolete.

With regards to this, I don’t believe FE roles are becoming obsolete, but the boundaries are blurring and not only because of AI.

For example, tools like Figma, Framer and Plasmic, where UIs can be built without knowing how to code them, and can generate component libraries in whatever framework. From then, a back-end developer knows enough to be able to implement those component libraries without further input.

On the AI front, the focus for me is on how the FE role can expand. By leveraging AI to handle mundane, tedious tasks (like boilerplate HTML or basic CSS), our team can focus on higher-value work: test automation, building mock APIs, and deeper integration into the .NET/Razor environment.

Where I still see AI struggling is the visual to code phase. Clients often deliver custom visual designs without a design system, and turning those into production ready templates is still largely manual work.

I can't agree more. In my experience, many designers are yet to shift their ways of working to make their designs more "AI friendly".

Currently AI is more than capable of handling simple and "boring" frontend components that have very little logic in them, like text and images, simple galleries or carousels, accordions, etc.

However, when it comes to more sophisticated stuff like search with filters, facets, ordering and pagination; dynamic forms with validation - we see AI struggling because there are many interdependent moving parts. The worst is, when it looks like it's 80% complete, "fixing" the remaining 20% seems to be taking forever as agents tend to break other things while fixing a specific bug. And even providing a whole architectural context is not always helpful. That's why I think solving complex tasks remains a frontend crafting skill even in 2026.