AI-generated frontend code didn’t save me time — it shifted the work

I’ve been building a tool that generates Angular/React components from a prompt.

At first, it felt like magic.
You describe a UI → get working code instantly.
But when I started using it in real projects, something unexpected happened:
I wasn’t actually saving time.
I was just shifting where the time goes.
Instead of writing UI from scratch, I was:

• fixing layout inconsistencies
• aligning components with my design system
• rewriting structure to make it reusable

It made me realize something important:
AI is fast at generating code — but frontend work isn’t about generating code.
It’s about integrating it into a system.
So the real workflow isn’t:
generate → done

It’s:

generate → structure → refine → reuse

That’s where most of the work still is.
Curious how others here are using AI for frontend:

Are you actually shipping generated components to production,
or mostly using it for prototyping?
I wrote a deeper breakdown here if anyone’s interested:
https://www.frontuna.com/blog/ai-react-component-generators-break-real-projects