"That's not where the discarded tiles go": The UI design barriers and human pride I felt while building a Mahjong game with AI

Hello! This is Takahashi.

Recently, using generative AI for coding has become a daily routine.
It is truly excellent when it comes to writing backend logic.
If I say, "I want this kind of feature," it returns great code without a single complaint. It's awesome.

However, when it comes to UI (User Interface), it's a different story.
Even if they can understand the logic, they suddenly become stubborn when it comes to "space" and "usability."

This happened when I tried to improve the Mahjong game I created using "Anti Gravity," which I wrote about in a previous article.
The backend processing went smoothly, but the moment I left the placement of the tiles on the screen to the AI, I immediately fell into a quagmire.

The AI doesn't know the "common sense" of the game of Mahjong.
When I instructed it to "line up the discarded tiles in front of the player," the AI tried to place them in the literal "front" based on coordinates.
"Oh, no, that's not what I meant by front... the discard pile (ho) should be here..."
No matter how much I explained, or even when I provided diagrams and supplemented them with text, it was like talking to a brick wall.
It just couldn't grasp the context of the space known as a "Mahjong table."

In the end, I keenly felt that human hands are still needed for fine-tuning design and UI. For intuitive parts like "shift it 5px to the right" or "this is how much margin I want," it is overwhelmingly faster and more accurate for a human to touch it directly.

Of course, looking at the current speed of evolution, in the near future, it will likely be able to output a "nice-looking Mahjong table" in one go. I have high expectations for that.

However, I sometimes feel a bit scared. Before AI becomes capable of producing 100-point designs, I worry that the standards of us humans might drop as a concern.

"Well, it was made by AI, so 70 points is fine, I guess." "It's a bit hard to use, but it's automatically generated, so I'll just put up with it."

I don't want a future where humans learn to compromise like that and our aesthetic sense becomes dull.
Precisely because AI is evolving, I want us to stubbornly hold onto our commitment to "what makes a 100-point UI" *ᴗˬᴗ)⁾⁾⁾