09. Are Prompt Templates Still Worth Keeping

I found vibeprompts.dev, a site with templates that generate Tailwind CSS components from natural language. Handy to use: it amounts to describing a web page or a component in plain words. My guess is they feed existing components to an agent and let it write the prompts.

A simple sign-in page example:

Build a full-height split-screen sign-in page with Tailwind CSS. On the left, a centered login card (~360px wide) with a logo, an email and password field, a "Remember me" checkbox with a "Forgot password?" link on the same row, a full-width primary button, and a divider before a "Continue with Google" outline button. On the right half, a solid brand-colored panel with a large headline and a short testimonial, hidden below the lg breakpoint. Use rounded-xl inputs, subtle borders, and clear focus rings.

I also wondered whether you could hand an agent an image, a wireframe for example, and get the same component out of it.

Images are good at layout and color. A static screenshot cannot say what happens after a click, or show what a failed load looks like, or show the state with no data. That information has to come from somewhere else. vibeprompts.dev is only meant to provide UI, and the components it writes look different every time.

So extra prompts have to carry the rest. A template that only says "clean and nice" tells you very little. One that spells out the interactive states and the project constraints will save you from missing things when you reuse it.

For an agent, images cost more tokens and more inference than plain text, and plain text pins down interaction logic more precisely.

So I would put the image and the prompt in the same task. If the page design is not settled yet, generate a component or page from one of these prompts, screenshot it, and feed the screenshot back to the AI to get the components.

Use the image to show the visual effect you want and text to fill in the rest. Whether a template is worth keeping comes down to whether it cuts the explaining and rework later. How far the Vibeprompts templates actually get, I would have to try on a real component before deciding.