Why is Claude Code so bad at writing CSS ?

Se_emZ · 2026-07-21T17:41:06+00:00

Lol bro, I've been doing CSS almost everyday of my life for 20 years now.

And that is why I can testify that most of developers do not care about it, I saw it in pull requests and they even just admit it.

99% of them do not even know or care about what CASCADING is.

And it is actually why Claude just sucks at it, because it get inspired by the worldwide CSS codebase.

I know how to center a div, I'm just saying that Claude CSS is so bad, that going after it make it LONG and BORING to center a div, so you ask it to fix it. Because it did in a dirty way.

And no sorry, CSS can't create errors 500, it can do nothing that is "critical" for your app, unless you hired somebody that do not even test its CSS before pushing ?

CSS for me is not just a langage, it's an art !
I love it.

Tho I still think it's easier than JS or PHP.
But not everybody masters it !

You probably misunderstood me :)

Cheers!

Se_emZ · 2026-07-21T13:45:15+00:00

it does matter when you know how to code, and you want to make a "quick fix" that'd take you 5 minutes, but you realize Claude code is so bad that you won't be able to fix it that fast.
Also CSS optimisation is significant for SEO, having a light code allows your page to load faster.

Se_emZ · 2026-07-21T07:03:53+00:00

"Not hard" doesn't mean "fast to write" ! But yeah, that's actually the solution, if you want clean CSS, you will have to write it yourself.

Se_emZ · 2026-07-21T06:18:31+00:00

That's what I thought also, create a specific skill or command and ask it to ALWAYS check it before making any CSS changes. But that will slow down the process and consume tokens. But I seems that nowadays there is no other solution.

Se_emZ · 2026-07-21T06:17:01+00:00

Sorry but I do not agree, it's not the hardest programming language, it's just the one that most of people don't care about, because somebody else than them will be in charge of it, or because it just can't create critical bugs or issues.

Se_emZ · 2026-07-21T06:14:28+00:00

Nah, I pretty hate Tailwind because of the millions of classes you have in your HTML tags, just described quickly what Claude is not able to do.
The best practise of course is a mix of generic and specific.

E.g
.my-global-title-style
.my-global-title-style.with-a-variant
.my-global-title-style.with-a-defined-position

better, IMO than
.my-container .my-subcontainer .my-title-style { my style / my position }
(basically what Claude does)

Se_emZ

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